Wired: Mister Disruption Strikes Again

Xeni Jardin 8:08 am Mon Aug 11, 2003

I wrote this piece for Wired News about Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com (pissed off the RIAA) and Lindows (pissed off Microsoft) who's now aiming to overturn telecom economics with his latest venture, SIPphone — a VOIP startup that offers free calling over broadband connections.

By offering low-cost SIP phones — $129.99 per pair, with plans to reduce the price to $40 per phone within a year and $20 within two — Robertson hopes to tap into SIP's early momentum, just as he did with his Linux and MP3 ventures.

"Wherever there's massive potential disruption, there's massive business opportunity … that happens wherever you can completely digitize a product — with music, MP3s; with software, Linux; with voice communication, SIP," says Robertson. "By moving something from the offline world into the digital world, you're placing it back in the consumer's control."

"There's no per-minute cost for the phone company to zap electrons from one set of copper wires to another, so why do we pay per minute?" he says, "If you intersect with the (regular phone) system, you inherit their cost structure. With SIP to SIP, it can all be free."

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