There is no killer app

An increasing culture of customization and large variations in our sense of style, performance and value seem to limiting the birth of killer applications. Wikipedia defines a killer app as:

A killer application (commonly shortened to killer app) is a computer program that is so useful that people will buy a particular piece of computer hardware, gaming console, and/or an operating system simply to run that program.

Seems like a reasonable enough goal for any new application. :-)

Killer apps were essential in the rise of personal computers and the Internet with things like VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Aldus PageMaker, Adobe PostScript and E-mail. However it has to be said that most applications don't start out by being killer applications. They would mostly start small and be useful to a few users or in a lot of cases, just be useful to the author! If the application was well designed and implemented then they might end up being useful to a lot more people and thus achieve killer app status.

It seems the approach to take is to solve as many user problems as you can, and solve them well. If we keep sitting around for that big idea then it might never come - or so argues Ramit Sethi in his blog post, The Myth of the Great Idea. He says,

Success almost never comes from a mind-blowing idea, so sitting around trying to find one is a waste of time. Success comes from a basic idea executed amazingly well. Ideas are rarely found by thinking. They're found by doing.

So get those smaller ideas out again and start working on them! Now where did I put that darn paper napkin?

Links

• The Myth of the Great Idea