By the end of June I was on Astricon Europe which was hosted in London. It’s basically a conference about anything based or connected with the Asterisk – a software PBX. The conference was rather good (I’ll probably write more on that here), but when talking about Asterisk one thing shouldn’t be omitted: its creator – Mark Spencer.
Why is it so? It can be said that Mark is another counterexample to my thesis about CEO who should be business-based person. He’s another geeky CEO (like Bill Gates) who made it to create successful company. Digium, which sells telecommunication cards used in Asterisk implementations, is (I believe) very profitable company. Even though Asterisk is open source so it’s free, it usually has to use some telephony interface – the telecommunication card. One of choices is Digium. It’s for sure the best integrated hardware with the Asterisk. Hey, that’s all the same company.
Why am I mumbling then? Extremely technical guy who actually is the CEO and drives his company to bright future, right? Nah! Mark is extremely technical guy with great ideas and consistency which allows him to bring those ideas into reality. What more he is successful with Digium and I believe he is happy with things he does. However when counting success in bucks (what a filthy capitalist way of thinking) I wouldn’t call Digium a perfectly organized company.
Their core business is Asterisk – more (free!) Asterisks are implemented more Digium cards are sold. Plain sailing. The best business case would be to make implementing Asterisk as easy as possible, right? Nah! Remember – the CEO is a developer in his soul. They made pretty darn good work with creating original open source project, which is significant milestone in telephony, but they failed to create a product.
To have your Asterisk installed in a way you want you need to go quite deep into configuration and documentation. It’s rather hard to do it in the first attempt. Especially when you don’t use one of predefined configurations (and in 95% of case you don’t). Whole installation, setting up protocols, implementing IVR, configuring whole thing takes a lot of work. That’s not black magic, but it takes time to push your way through all white papers, newsgroups archives, FAQs and so on. It’s not the from-the-shelf product. It’s a piece of open source software that has to be customized and implemented. From the integrator’s perspective it’s cool. From Digium’s business perspective it is not.
I see here strong influence of Asterisk creator – Mark Spencer, who feels technical details much, much better than business and product management. He focuses on areas in which he’s very strong instead of focusing on areas in which there are many stronger ones.
That’s why Mark Spencer harms his company in some way. I believe Digium has great potential, but it won’t be fulfilled until someone starts look at the company from strictly business perspective. I don’t think Mark will be the one. Remember – he’s a developer (he even looks like the developer) and he doesn’t seem to feel the other side, like Bill Gates.
Btw: Sorry for some silence from me, I was on short holidays. I still love sailing and I still love polish lakes. There are some things that never changes.
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