kill app

Email’s Sting: Moving beyond the buzz of ‘killer apps’

Of all the overused and inane buzzwords in the IT industry, the phrase “killer application” has to be right up there in the top five. Vendors peddling superfluous technology and latest add-on add-in kudzu always seem to truck out this term when they talk about future strategies and market share, as in, “Our new whiz-bang gizmo will surely take off when that ‘killer app’ surfaces to drive the demand for our product!”

Analysts and market researchers, like weather forecasters, don’t often take the time to look out the window to see what is happening in the real world. As a result, they too throw around buzzwords and generic terms like beaded necklaces at a Mardi Gras parade. Among the terms now being tossed in the air to giddy end users are cloud computing, telepresence and social computing -– the last one of my favorites since the antithesis would, of course, be anti-social computing. I also like it when vendors marry buzzwords and come up with terms like “unified communications in the cloud,” which suggest that clouds are getting in the way of clear market thinking.

WAN-dow dressing

Killer app is particularly annoying, though, since there is really no such thing because the applications in use are obviously more important to me than the applicants used on your systems. It’s just that simple and personal. If there is one application that might be awarded “killer” status, however, it is email, since everyone knows it, loves it (most times) and uses it. You can drape it in all sorts of buzzword dressing and fold it into such terms as collaborative computing, unified communications or instant messaging, but, at the end of the day, it works, it’s effective and it is the mainstay of most any enterprise computing network.

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