The name “Killer App” says a lot about the level of violence in the world of business (well, in the world in general). Such a piece of software is dubbed a “killer” if it somehow triggers a massive uptick in the adoption of its underlying platform, at such levels that would be otherwise impossible to imagine without the app leading the charge. The scale and sheer levels of capital injected into the software industry in the past 50 years have brought quite a few examples of such “Killer Apps.” But what about the “App Killer,” that is, those with the opposite effect? Well, it turns out there are quite a few examples of them, too.
Let us first enumerate some canonical examples of “Killer Apps.” There is a quintessential one everyone (well, at least computer history boffins like the authors of this journal) mentions: VisiCalc for the Apple II. But there are others; unfortunately for VisiCalc, it was not the actual killer app for the IBM 5150 (aka “IBM PC”), because Lotus 1-2-3 took that crown.
In the same category, we can also mention Microsoft Office (and by extension, Excel) for Microsoft Windows, one of those few examples where the same company delivered the platform and the software everybody wanted to run at the same time (which also strongly suggests that spreadsheets did have an oversized influence on shopping decisions back in the day!). In a similar vein, Aldus PageMaker was the killer app for the original Apple Macintosh and the LaserWriter printer, allowing small shops to be able to produce extremely high-quality printouts from their work in a very affordable package (well, at least for businesses).
Other famous examples of “Killer Apps” would be the Unix operating system for the C programming language; in the 1980s everyone wanted to run (or copy or clone or rewrite) Unix, and said passion pushed its associated programming language to unforeseen levels of popularity (still enjoyed to the time of this publication, by the way). More examples in the programming language arena? I could mention Jupyter and NumPy for Python and even the original iPhone for Objective-C.
In the recently published book “Steve Jobs in Exile,” we can read the story of how Jean-Marie Hullot’s Interface Builder was the “Killer App” for the NeXT computer, used by companies in the financial industry and government to build new applications in record times.
There is another interesting example I can relate very directly to. In 2008, an otherwise unknown software developer from Switzerland reverse-engineered the API of the national railway company website. He subsequently released a very early application for the iPhone that allowed users to be able to know when the next train was leaving town. That application was not made with the consent of the SBB-CFF-FFS (that is the name of the Swiss national railway company, with a triple acronym in each of the major national languages of the country). After some legal hurdles and reaching an agreement, said developer sold the source code of the app to the SBB-CFF-FFS, who took over its development. The interesting thing is that the mere existence of this application boosted iPhone sales to incredible levels, making Switzerland the country with the highest concentration of iPhones in the world until around 2011.
Closer to us, one could argue that Argo CD is the “Killer App” for Kubernetes; in the experience of this author, the Argo CD console has become, in various DevOps shops, the default dashboard to monitor and deploy countless applications hundreds of times per day, pushing the “GitOps” paradigm to its pinnacle. I have this small theory of mine that companies install Kubernetes (or their associated products) just for the sake of being able to use Argo CD. And no, I am not kidding, and so far, I have had no facts countering this hypothesis.
But enough of “Killer Apps”; let us talk about “App Killer” now. On many occasions, the software industry witnessed an application obliterating a previous one into oblivion, and the factors that cause this destruction are seldom related to the inherent quality of the incumbent or the competitor.
Occasionally the “App Killer” is just bad business acumen; the Osborne effect, whereby a company drives itself out of business by announcing a better product than the one it is currently selling… before it is available, thereby cannibalizing its demand and cutting short its supply of cash. Ouch. On the other extreme, we have self-cannibalization, something that Apple practiced with gusto during the legendary run of the 2000s; the iPhone, very famously, destroyed the iPod, with both (very profitable) cash flows directed towards the same bank account. Talk about learning a lesson or two from Osborne.
Speaking about the iPhone, we can say that it was the “App Killer” for a few other platforms: Symbian, BlackBerry, and even Adobe Flash. Regarding this last case, it is quite ironic that 15 years later, iPhones (and pretty much any device with a relatively modern web browser) can run Adobe Flash content thanks to WebAssembly and Ruffle.
Another business-related “App Killer” is bad product management. In this respect we can mention Google, which has a long-held tradition of killing products, even relatively successful ones, with short notice and usually without any kind of reasonable upgrade path. There is even a website called “Killed by Google” that keeps track of this (very) long list of casualties. Requiescat in pace, Google Reader. Another interesting case of killing product management skills is that of Facebook obliterating Parse. Mobile app developers old enough to remember this will rejoice. Another recent example? The Humane AI Pin, which effectively obliterated a whole company out of business.
Actually, here comes another fascinating “App Killer,” very en vogue at the time of this publication: Artificial Intelligence, at least the LLM-fueled one, getting massive amounts of Erin Brockovich-fueled backlash from pretty much everyone except tech bros.
Corporate incompetence is another “App Killer” related to the previous examples: we have mentioned Borland in the pages of this magazine, erasing itself out of the minds of developers for apparently no rational reason. Oracle does this regularly too, throwing lawyers at pretty much anyone or anything standing in its way, but with demonstrably higher rates of success than Borland. Oh, and speaking of legal issues, let us not forget that lawyers were the “App Killers” for Napster, too.
Let us not forget about another classical “App Killer” phenomenon: major rewrites. Ah yes, a company decides to rewrite their flagship cash cow, only to discover that it was a gargantuan task, it will never be ready on time, and if delivered, it would be immediately replaced by something better? Comes to mind Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3, Digg v4, AngularJS, KDE 4, Windows Longhorn, Evernote 10, Project Pyramid (an effort to rewrite Microsoft Word in the 1990s, eventually abandoned), the 2024 Sonos app overhaul catastrophe, and the canonical example of them all, the rewrite of Netscape Navigator that would lead to Mozilla Firefox… 6 years later, and conceding the web to Internet Explorer.
All things considered, software remains a brittle thing, not because of the pervasiveness of bugs, but because software markets are extremely sensitive to hiccups of all kinds. The application, actually the whole software stack you are using today, has more chances of disappearing in the next ten years than remaining alive, let alone relevant at all. Those apps and platforms that survive the killing spree, usually deemed “boring” by hype-fueled types, are those that pass the test of time and stability and become actual staples of productivity and mental well-being.
In a certain way, it is a mechanism akin to natural selection, but without anything natural in it.
Cover photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash.