The trade rags are constantly on the lookout for the next "Killer App". I don't personally have
the foggiest idea what the next killer anything will be. If I knew stuff like that, I would have
invested some shekels into Netscape when it went public what? Three months ago, and is now
selling at 4X the IPO.
But, we can look back, and see what some killer apps Were. Clearly, in the PC business, the
very first such was Lotus 123. I remember when the first IBM PCs were delivered to the
corporate offices of World Wide Widgets in 1982. The few lucky people who got one (not I, of
course; that would take something like seven more years) sat around and played with
Sleazywriter, the official word processor for the first PCs (written by an ex con man who was
known in the popular press as Captain Crunch), and Visicalc, an Apple II spreadsheet ported to
the PC, and Dbase II, another port from earlier 8 bit micros. (I got a chance to learn about this
stuff early, because people like me had to show the heavies what got these perks how to use
them.)
And then, a few months later, people started getting ahold of Lotus. And the people who cared
about such things, and at the corporate office there were a lot of such people, went nuts. It used
the entire capability of the PC, since it was written expressly for it. It was fast. It did graphics
(which Visicalc then did not). It could even be a database of sorts. Soon, Lotus became the
justification for getting one of these wiz bang 8088's on your desk, and once you got it there, for
upgrading its memory, and soon its disk capacity (when that became available), and ... And this
is what a killer app is, the application that justifies the hardware purchase.
And, it just about put me out on the street. At the time, a lot of my programming work was in
writing what would today clearly be called spreadsheets, but what was then called a custom
program to do the specific task of, say, heat balance for one of the turbines that maybe the
Sparkle Division of WWW might want to optimize. Pretty soon, the phone stopped ringing, and
I had to find some other sinecure.
To survive, I got Vaxinated, and started applying Dec Vax computers to some laboratory
applications that the Valley Division of WWW had. There were four of us working on that
project, each in an office next to the other. Even though a quiet bellow down the hall would
allow you to communicate with any of the other people in the group, we found that the internal
email system that came with the Vax became so very much more friendly a way to leave a
suggestion, comment on a feature, or just deal with short pieces of information that one acquires
on a project, and that should somehow be shared. Using this, you did not have to interrupt
somebody in Deep Thought, or play phone tag, or wait till they came back from lunch or soccer
practice or whatever. When you had a brainsprinkle, you could immediately let everybody else
know about it too, even at 8PM when everybody else had gone home.
The good and the bad news on all this, is that all these neat messages are kept electronically.
The good news is, they can be organized in some useful fashion, say with Folders or some sort of
subject heading, in their electronic format, so that you can retrieve them later. You are starting to
approach a paperless office. The bad news is, you really are starting to approach a paperless
office, and when you leave that office, instead of taking all your priceless gems of thought with
you in a binder, you leave them all behind on the computer you just walked away from. Of
course, you can create a floppy copy for yourself, or you could print them out and keep the hard
copy. But nobody ever does. There is a two year gap in my chron files for the time I was
working on that project, because I did everything electronically, and rarely made a personal copy.
When I transferred to the North Side Division of WWW, I finally got my own office PC, but I
had lost the email function that I had grown quite used to. So I started pestering management
about how really neat and wonderful a LAN would be for our group, and how much group
sharing it would promote, and how much we would save by using the LAN as a Data and
Program server, and how much we would all really really like email once we had it in. I also had
in the back of my mind that this thing would need a LAN Administrator, and who better to get a
fire proof job like that (they can't fire you because nobody else in the whole division knows what
you are doing, or even if what you are doing is worth doing, and if anybody ever tries to find out
if you are doing anything useful, all you need to do is sprinkle your conversations with geeky
terms like Firewall, Domain Server, Protocol Stacks, and NLMs and TCP and IPX and they go
away confused and impressed) than me, of course.
The short story is, two years later we did get our LAN, and somebody else got that juicy fire
proof job. The point of this whole long history lesson is: the email function of the LAN has
clearly been one of the killer apps of all time. We can probably trace the purchase of about half
our current computers to this need alone. Our email has expanded from just our local offices, to
the whole WWW North plant, to the various other major facilities around the US, and now even
to WWW facilities and clients around the world. We not only communicate, but we schedule
meetings, vacations, conference rooms, and even the company car electronically. Production
people who ordinarily would not have ever been expected to be computer literate, now all have
PCs on their desks, and primarily so that they have a way to be electronically connected.
The downside is, it is SO easy to flame. I have been both the source, and the destination, of
flames. A flaming email is one that is perhaps written in haste, perhaps written when the author
is or just has been under some emotional stress, perhaps even to the point of being just a lot
Ticked Off at something, and so said author sits down and blasts out a long set of very
judgmental remarks about somebody else's thought processes, ancestry, intellectual ability, and
interchangeability of various body parts. And even worse, the author not only sends such a
subjective letter to some one person, but maybe even to a Whole lot of people, because it is So
easy to just click names off an electronic address list and make them recipients too.
When you have to go and talk to somebody, perhaps even in a heated state, it is generally just the
two of you; nothing gets written down for posterity, and after the blood gets cleaned up off the
furniture, nobody else is ever the wiser. A flaming email though lives on long after the two of
you have collected your pensions or unemployment checks. It usually takes some time to
physically find the object of your disaffection, and often during that time, things calm down, the
world does not end, birds chirp, and by the time you do get ahold of him (three cycles of
telephone tag later) you have almost forgotten what got you all excited in the first place. But
with email, the instant the steam from your scalp blows your hairpiece off, you can send a flame
and really live to regret it. Unless you outrank the guy you are sending it to, in which case He
lives to regret it.
There is no body language involved with email. When you are shouting at somebody eyeball to
eyeball, there is some subjective feedback that goes on depending on how the other person is
taking to the discussion environment. If you find that your fellow conversationalist is about to
raise the level of the discussion by implanting his fist firmly in your schnozzole, generally you
have some time to back peddle and calm things down. With email, the message can accidentally
act as a 2X4 to get someone's attention, perhaps a degree of attention that you did not intend.
Fortunately, there are "job saver" functions that let you recall email that has not yet been read. I
have been known to go into the office early on a Sunday morning to retract a message that I sent
out on a Friday in somewhat of a haste, and which upon reflection seemed to me better not sent.
And after you yourself get hammered a few times, you start to consider just how strong some
words can be when written down, generally stronger than when said verbally.
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