OStatic

Growing Up Asterisk

My friend and occasional business partner Jay Phillips heads the open source project Adhearsion, which is attempting to broaden adoption of the Asterisk platform by allowing people to develop applications in Ruby. He recently wrote a lengthy post on his blog that details many of the issues facing the Asterisk community today.

Phillips goes into great depth, but the one key point that he makes is that the open source world and the companies that it creates often fall into a misconception that their adoption is broad-based, when it really isn't. He speaks of Digium, the company founded to sell hardware and support for Asterisk, but his point is quite easily applied to many projects. He says:

One fascinating characteristic of technology adoption (which Geoffrey Moore introduces early in his book [Crossing the Chasm]) is the false sense of security it can create when the rush of enthusiasm comes from the early adopters (left of the chasm). To the company, it’s easy to assume this adoption will continue linearly into eventual ubiquity. This misconception has crushed many a dream when the unsuspecting company ramps up just as their adoption profile plateaus at the chasm. I feel Digium has been caught up in this misconception.

This author has seen this happen time and time again. Enthusiasm is great at the start of a project, but as time goes on and adoption begins to ramp up that enthusiasm can often become a liability. "More people are using the product. Things must be going gangbusters," people often think. When the reality is actually closer to, "the early adopters love our stuff. Now how do we get everyone to use it?"

The tendency to overreach is common and a bit disconcerting. This is likely caused by the phenomenal success of projects like Linux in the marketplace. Linux has a broad-based adoption because it not only filled a need, but it filled it in a way that the market could understand. Open source projects tend to forget that the early adopters are the geeks who develop and use it. Those people have less influence over the decision to use the product as time goes on and the adoption broadens to larger customers.

Open source project leaders should take this lesson to heart and examine their growth strategies. Your project may be doomed to failure or relegated to the ever growing list of niche projects out there today if you reach too far too fast or fail to reach for the right people at the right time. I encourage you to read Phillips' entire post and glean some very insightful knowledge from it.

• PBX
• telephony
• Asterisk

by alan Wilensky on Aug. 11, 2008

You know, It's very interesting that the critical jump from niche to mid-market is so driven by brand image.

The needs of the intermediate market are so different from the earlies - there must be a special pixie dust that crosses it over.

Even at this late stage, in the consumer domain, there is no Linux (or Asterisk) brand - mid and late adopters will have nothing to do with them, irregardless of benefits.

I think this issue of brand equity is one of the least understood dynamics in the technology products industry. Apple has unlocked it; and despite a net negative brand image, Microsoft has unlocked it.

If any of the Linux or open source companies is yet to break open this power of the mid-market, I've yet to see it in practice.

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by an anonymous user on Aug. 11, 2008

This unfortunately seems to be a woe of several initiatives, within Open Source and other areas too. Volunteer organizations start out with the same kind of gusto, but then the original members leave, or get busy, or lack resources, and the other volunteers then tend to move on to other things, leaving the well-intentioned 'project' to then languish...

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