Product Description

Now in Paperback--A Business Week Bestseller! Over 100,000 hardcover copies sold!

When technologies, products, and services converge in radical, creative new ways, a killer app can emerge--a new application so powerful that it transforms industries, redefines markets, and annihilates the competition. Companies large and are swiftly attempting to remake themselves into organizations that nurture killer apps and successfully translate their digital strategy into market dominance.

With Unleashing the Killer App, Downes and Mui offer a progressive guide to transforming your company into a place where killer apps are born. Drawing from their experience and research with leading global businesses, the authors:

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #376504 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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

From the Publisher
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

From the Author
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

Customer Reviews

Not worth it
This book is useless! Most of the examples are well known if you read the newspaper.

How many buzzwords can you fit in a paragraph
If you ever want to read a book that attempts to use every technology buzzword in existance, this is the one. This book has some interesting examples of companies that are gaining a competitive advantage using technology, but the author's try to be a little too "cute" with their knowledge of industry buzzwords. Give only a cursory reading of part 1 or just skip it and go right to part 2 and 3.

One thing that really annoyed me thoughout the book was the author's attempts to create then overuse something called Metcalf's Law and Moore's Law out of a couple of common sense observations. In each chapter, the authors constantly refered back to Metcalf's Law and Moore's Law as if these "laws" are on the same plateau as some created by Einstein. Both Metcalf and Moore are intellegent, excellent inventors, and astute businessmen, but I would never try to create some "law" out of a couple of common sense observations. After reading this book, I envision the authors having statues of Metcalf and Moore in their offices that they kneel in front of daily for inspiration.

My opinion, don't spend your own money on this book. Borrow it or get your company to pay for it.

"Dilbertesque"
Man, what a load of crap. As a web developer, I was forced to read this book by a well-meaning Boss. Some of the content is so vague and filled with so much MBA double-speak, marketing-weasel garbage it is laugh-out-load funny. (The chart explaining the difference between a "Digital Strategy" and a traditional strategy is a hoot.) Only recommended for those who are still regularly using the phrase "think outside the box" in passing conversation.