How Great Ideas Are Born

There is a story connected with creating Asterisk. Few years ago Mark Spencer - creator of Asterisk - owned a company, which was providing some professional services, and they needed a PBX. What would average person do in this situation? He’d buy one. There is a problem however – PBXs are expensive. Very expensive. Exceedingly expensive. At least that’s how situation looked then.

You could choose from not-so-wide variety of pieces of hardware delivered by big companies which didn’t see any reason why they should lower their prices to a reasonable level. Actually they still don’t see the reason. It was like choosing the lesser evil. You need a PBX? Pay! Price is high. The only thing you can choose is a beneficiary.

Mark didn’t agree that all the PBXs are evil... er... expensive and he just had to buy one. He was looking for another way. There weren’t any paved, so he tried to made his own. Challenging Nortel, Alcatel or Siemens on their terms wasn’t a great idea. It would be hard to create classic PBX in the garage.

In this kind of situations great ideas are born. If you can’t play on their rules you look for another playground, which won’t handicap you. So did Mark Spencer. He realized that PBX is (almost) nothing more than a piece of software. Some of the operations are done with use of the hardware, but that’s nothing which won’t be possible with simple PC. Of course the less specific hardware, the more software work to do, but that’s nothing a software geek couldn’t do. That is how Asterisk was born.

The great thing in Asterisk is that it rearranged the PBX market. For now it’s still not a revolution, but it’s already a success. It’s throwing down the gauntlet to few very well known and very big companies. It’s like guerilla warfare – we won’t stand against them on plain, but try us in the mountains (btw: guerilla was similar great idea in the other area of life).

The same story you can tell about Google AdSense. They also rearranged their area (area of ads) or even they put it upside down. Don’t be very surprised if Asterisk starts doing similar mess in PBX market.

Great ideas very often come from lack of approval to current situation. Then creativity turns on. If you’re content with what you have, you probably won’t try to change or improve. You’ll just buy your PBX.