Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance [Hardcover]

You don't have to look far to see that technology is driving today's economy. Turn on CNBC, open The Economist, scan the Wall Street Journal--you'll find that technology is the prime force creating growth in almost every industry. In Unleashing the Killer App, authors Larry Downes and Chunka Mui look at the dynamics of technological change and its potential to create "killer apps." The authors describe a killer app as a product or service that "wind up displacing unrelated older offerings, destroying and re-creating industries far from their immediate use, and throwing into disarray the complex relationships between business partners, competitors, customers, and regulators of markets." Examples of killer apps throughout history include the Welsh longbow, the pulley, the compass, moveable type, and the Apple Macintosh. And today, with our increasingly networked economy (for example, the World Wide Web), killer apps are appearing all around us.

Downes and Mui argue that the dominant trend behind the proliferation of killer apps is a combination of Moore's Law, which states that the processing power of the CPU doubles every 18 months, and Metcalfe's Law, which observes that the value of a network increases dramatically with each node that's added to it. These two laws are fundamentally changing how businesses interact with each other and with their customers. To exploit these changes, the authors outline 12 points for designing a digital strategy to help you identify and create killer apps in your own organization. The book includes dozens of examples of how killer apps were discovered and implemented.

Unleashing the Killer App provides an excellent framework for rethinking the nature of business in today's wired economy. No matter the size of your company or what it does--health care, publishing, or fast food--there's probably a killer app lurking somewhere. This book will help you find it. Highly recommended. --Harry C. Edwards

When technologies, products, and services converge in radical, creative new ways, a killer app emerges-a new application so powerful that it transforms industries, redefines markets, and annihilates the competition. The steam engine, the cotton gin, and the Model T were all killer apps of their time. Today's killer apps spring from the digital realm: the personal computer, e-mail, and the World Wide Web. Tempted by the promise of such devastating power, companies large and small, from vast multinationals to lean entrepreneurial start-ups, are remaking themselves into organizations that nurture killer apps rather than succumb to them. How is it done? In this groundbreaking new book, strategists Downes and Mui identify the twelve fundamental design principles for building killer apps and offer a progressive guide to transforming your company into a place where killer apps are born. Unleashing the Killer App provides the tools, the techniques, and the proof that you need to incubate the killer app within your organization--and perhaps even release one.

This book NEEDS to be read by all directors,chairmen & CEOs.
This is an exciting book which should probably be read through once quickly, thought about, and read a second time more slowly. Not that all its revelations, or examples (there are dozens of these culled from the authors' consultancy work with US and UK companies), or recommendations are new. But it is, very unusually, a book of joined-up thinking which leaves one with new insights into why things are the way they are, and how apparently different phenomena relate to each other. Any business person can gain greater understanding of the world he or she works in from reading this book; directors of established companies have their jobs and their companies to lose if they are unaware of its lessons.

Above all this book needs to be read by boards of directors, chairmen and CEOs. No good will come of advising marketing managers to cannibalise their markets, destroy their value chains, and treat their assets as liabilities - unless top management has unequivocally bought into the process. And that won't come easily: perhaps a few quick corporate deaths will help to stimulate the thinking process and encourage the others.

The Killer App is not a competative product or project that you can see coming from a long way away, and whose speed of approach you can guage. More probably it is an idea in the head of some nerd, which can appear out of left field tomorrow and decimate your business without warning. Perhaps it isn't true that everybody and every business is under immediate threat of demolition. But you, and yours, could well be. So learn the lesson now: adapt or die; kill or be killed. And read the book.

INTERACTIVE MARKETING - NOVEMBER 1999

killer strategies
We hope some of the ideas in this book will help you unleash your own killer apps. Please let us know what you think of it.

Best regards, Chunka & Larry

Larry Downes is a consultant and speaker, and writer. He is an adjunct professor of law at Northwestern University and a visiting fellow of the Diamond Exchange, an executive learning forum that brings together senior executives with leading strategy, technology, and learning experts. Chunka Mui is a partner with Diamond Technology Partners, director of the Diamond Exchange, and executive editor of the business journal Context.