You look forward to it like a birthday party when you’re a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen.Joe DiMaggio, on opening day
Dear Vorticians,
Baseball is in full swing and, for the first time in my life – many generations in fact – something wonderful actually happened on opening day. The Boston Red Sox got underway as the reigning world champs, collecting their gaudy World Series rings in a Boston-baked ceremony that involved everything short of immersing fans in baked beans. Imagine, the Sox as champs! To celebrate the season’s opening, and for all you baseball/physics lovers, I pass along this link to a terrific Slate article on why pitchers struggle to break the 100-mile-per-hour fastball limit: https://www.slate.msn.com/id/2116402.
I also pass along something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit recently. This was spurred by a vendor executive who turned the tables during a recent interview, throwing me a question I basically dread, but that comes up fairly often: What’s the next killer app?
The concept of the killer app has a powerful hold on our collective psychology. We want to believe that the entire market can be propelled forward by the next must-have technology that spawns a new generation of industry leaders and reshapes our lives. The spreadsheet, LANs, cell phones, e-mail, the Web and so on. Absent the next killer app, the market stagnates.
There’s some truth to all this. Personal computer sales were accelerated by the emergence of VisiCalc and 1-2-3. E-mail was a key driver in Internet adoption. But the role of the killer app has been over-dramatized as well. No single product or technology moves a $1 trillion global marketplace buffeted by myriad macro- and micro-economic forces.
Yet, the question persists and I always struggle to answer it. Hey, if I knew I’d start my own company and get rich. You think I want to be an executive conference producer forever? Sadly, like most people, I’m lousy at recognizing a killer app until well after it has proved its killer qualities. On occasion, I’ve thought a particular technology was a killer – can you say ATM? – only to watch it die a slow, painful death. (Actually, the ATM machine was quite a killer app for the banking industry.)
But the other day it dawned on me that there is a real killer app. It’s called complexity.
That’s a little play on words, actually. Something from a glib editor.
You see, complexity is a killer of applications. We’ve built highly complex, fault-prone IT environments that cost more and more just to maintain each year. This complexity robs money that could be directed toward new applications that move our businesses forward. Complexity has made it more difficult for IT shops to embrace new technologies and new ideas. It’s killing growth opportunities.
But complexity itself also represents a vast growth opportunity, and billions will be made helping users deal with it. It’s a true killer app.
At the highest level, companies like IBM, Microsoft, HP and others are cashing in on concepts like on-demand or utility computing which promise to transform how we build and use infrastructure. At a point-product level, companies like Egenera (blade servers) and VMWare (EMC’s server virtualization unit) are building businesses helping companies simplify certain facets of IT. Newly minted companies like Azul Systems (network-attached processing) and Cassatt (infrastructure virtualization) are being built on the mission of reducing complexity.
Complexity isn’t sexy and it isn’t as much fun to talk about as the Web or IP television. But if you’re asking about the ‘next big thing,” reducing complexity is the best answer I can think of.
What’s your best answer? Do you think there’s a new killer app? Tell me at mailto:jgallant@vortex.net.
Bye for now.
