Compass Points Reviews Unleashing the Killer App

unleashing the Killer App Thomas E. Ambler reviews

unleashing the Killer App
By Larry Downes and Chunka Mui
Harvard Business School Press, 1998 - 243 pages $24.95

Do you understand the forces behind the New Economy and the Digital Age? Do you now see technology as your main competitor instead of your chief weapon? Do you ponder what your firm should do about the Internet or "E-commerce"? These are parts of a bigger question addressed by Downes and Mui—"what about Killer Apps?"

But what is a Killer App? “A Killer App is a new good or service that establishes an entirely new category and, by being first, dominates it, returning several hundred per cent on the initial investment.” E-mail has clearly reached Killer App status. Killer Apps have important first-order effects, but their second-order effects are even more far-reaching—as well as being unintended.

The primary forces at work in spawning today’s Killer Apps are both technological and economic in nature. Understanding these forces is critical to success in the New Economy and the authors do an outstanding job of explaining them in layman’s terms.

Based on real-world experience and supported with rich examples, the authors promote the idea that sustainable competitive advantage in the Digital Age requires that we understand the competitive landscape in digital terms and unleash our own Killer Apps. They offer the following Twelve Principles of Killer App Design:

Outsource to the customer
Cannibalize your markets
Treat each customer as a market segment of one
Create communities of value
Replace rude interfaces with learning interfaces
Ensure continuity for the customer, not yourself
Give away as much information as you can
Structure every transaction as a joint venture
Treat your assets as liabilities
Destroy your value chain
Manage innovation as a portfolio of options
Hire the children

Counter-intuitive? Perhaps. Useful? Clearly!

Killer Apps apply to the success of your business as well as to a BP Oil or a startup dot-com. Just make sure you’re the one who’s doing the unleashing and not some unlikely competitor.

To do that, you’ll need this book. Get it! Digest it! Then do it!

This rates a 10 on the Ambler Scale, just like Lean Thinking by Womack and Jones (see our review in the April,1999 issue of Compass Points).

For more information or to order your copy of unleashing the Killer App from Amazon.com, click on the title.

For more, click here for a free subscription to Course and Direction.