For our 20 years special issue we went in search of the twenty killer apps,
products and tech n trends of the past. After a hot discussion for 15 days with
the team, we finally managed to chalked out top 20 of these. Then for some
reason we had to refer to December 99 issue of PCQuest and we noticed something
amazing. In that issue the things we had predicted will be killer in future, are
now killers of the past list. For eg we had predicted DVD as the product of the
future and now with evolution of Blue-ray it's a thing of past. It's amazing to
see how fast IT is changing.
In our IT buying survey, when we asked about likes and dislikes of technology,
one of respondents said that its not easy to like or dislike the technology,
because by the time you fall in love with a tech, some other technology would
have replaced it. So true ! isn't it ?
Well it all stands true for tech, not so much for killer apps. The apps like
email which was killer 20 years ago, still is everyone's fav app and most likely
20 years from now, its charm will be the same. Voice mail's and video mails have
been around for a long time now, but their usage still remains low as compared
to email. Same is the case with the web browsers, it started with mosaic (first
web browser) and now Firefox which has changed the internet surfing experience
and now with offline support for web apps. And here for a second think what that
application would be like that can replace web browsers. My point is no matter
how fast technology changes a true killer app is going to remain a killer app in
one form or another.
Swapnil Arora Issue Editor for this month |
A few common features among these killer apps is their ease of use and the fact
that they cater to masses not a small audience. Let's take Ping, another killer
app in our list, on which we had a lot of argument whether to put it in the list
or not. Ping again has been around for a long time and network administrators
can't imagine life without ping. Even myself don't remember a week, when I
didn't use ping. Now whenever something is wrong, ping is the first thing
everyone uses, be it windows or Linux it can work anywhere is very small in
size. Here the point is an application doesn't need to have a flashy GUI or
complex functions, it's all about the big problem that is being small by such a
small app. Similar has been the case with p2p apps. It all started with Napster
an idea of 19 year old, who knew that everyone's PC has got endless files, and
people need an easy way to share them. Many people thought with the fall of
Napster, Era of p2p apps is over. But it was not so, Kazaa, Lime Wire and many
other joined the bandwagon. Now with BitTorrent p2p apps continue to dominate
and are the first choice when downloading huge files.
With Web2.0 many new web apps have come up and it's still quite early to say
which one of these will get the title of a killer app. It could be a web OS or
any of the new social networking concepts floating around the web. I always
thought something that replaces blog will be a impressive app. Most likely its
going to be a Black Swan.