The Death of The Killer App

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The Death of The Killer App

As long as I can remember, a phrase that I have heard regularly is “what is the next killer app?”  Entrepreneurs and VCs are always looking for the next killer app upon which to build a huge business.  Last month, Richard Nolan and Robert Austin wrote a short article in Sloan Management Review that concluded that “even gifted visionaries [will not be able] to imagine the next killer app.”  They asserted that – as a result of research they’ve been doing with their HBS Internet2 Business Group – there are two critical practices to overcoming impediments to identifying the next multi-billion markets for communication technologies.  They are:

  1. Simply try things out: We are seeing this every day with all the web 2.0 stuff that’s being created.  The new approach – being used by many of our favorite web services – is build, release, test, iterate.  Google has popularized the notion of “beta services” – when everything is “beta”, you’ve got a new paradigm with a short (days / weeks / one month) release cycle that can be quickly iterated on rather than a monolithic 12 – 18 months (or more) release cycle. 
  2. Focus on the information context: This is a little harder to see in practice, but it’s all about “enabling the feedback loop between users and manufacturers.”  Eric von Hippel has been talking about this since the late 1970’s – he’s now calling it “Democratizing Innovation” – if you get both sides deeply involved in the innovation context, better things get created.  Tom Evslin’s been on a Typepad customization rampage – this is a great small example – and I hope our friends at Six Apart are watching.

Nolan and Austin conclude by suggesting “Extrapolation of the present will follow lines less straight and more recombinant than can be deciphered.  In that case, we will need processes and technologies that will allow us to intelligently stumble upon the future.”  Adam Bosworth talked recently about “keeping it simple and sloppy” – this is a big part of intelligently stumbling forward.  Who needs a “killer app” when you can play until something special emerges?

August 15th, 2005     Categories: Technology    
via feld.com

When We Hated Mom

ONE of the most enduring myths about feminism is that 50 years ago women who stayed home full time with their children enjoyed higher social status and more satisfying lives than they do today. All this changed, the story goes, when Betty Friedan published her 1963 best seller, “The Feminine Mystique,” which denigrated stay-at-home mothers. Ever since, their standing in society has steadily diminished.

That myth — repeated in Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly’s new book, “The Flipside of Feminism” — reflects a misreading of American history. There was indeed a time when full-time mothers were held in great esteem. But it was not the 1950s or early 1960s. It was 150 years ago. In the 19th century, women had even fewer rights than in the 1950s, but society at least put them on a pedestal, and popular culture was filled with paeans to their self-sacrifice and virtue.

When you compare the diaries and letters of 19th-century women with those of women in the 1950s and early 1960s, you can see the greater confidence of the earlier mothers about their value to society. Many felt they occupied a “nobler sphere” than men’s “bank-note” world.

The wife of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sophia, told her mother that she did not share her concerns about improving the rights of women, because wives already exerted “a power which no king or conqueror can cope with.” Americans of the era believed in “the empire of the mother,” and grown sons were not embarrassed about rhapsodizing over their “darling mama,” carrying her picture with them to work or war.

In the early 20th century, under the influence of Freudianism, Americans began to view public avowals of “Mother Love” as unmanly and redefine what used to be called “uplifting encouragement” as nagging. By the 1940s, educators, psychiatrists and popular opinion-makers were assailing the idealization of mothers; in their view, women should stop seeing themselves as guardians of societal and familial morality and content themselves with being, in the self-deprecating words of so many 1960s homemakers, “just a housewife.”

Stay-at-home mothers were often portrayed as an even bigger menace to society than career women. In 1942, in his best-selling “Generation of Vipers,” Philip Wylie coined the term “momism” to describe what he claimed was an epidemic of mothers who kept their sons tied to their apron strings, boasted incessantly of their worth and demanded that politicians heed their moralizing.

Momism became seen as a threat to the moral fiber of America on a par with communism. In 1945, the psychiatrist Edward Strecher argued that the 2.5 million men rejected or discharged from the Army as unfit during World War II were the product of overly protective mothers.

In the same year, an information education officer in the Army Air Forces conjectured that the insidious dependency of the American man on “ ‘Mom’ and her pies” had “killed as many men as a thousand German machine guns.” According to the 1947 best seller “Modern Woman: The Lost Sex,” two-thirds of Americans were neurotic, most of them made so by their mothers.

Typical of the invective against homemakers in the 1950s and 1960s was a 1957 best seller, “The Crack in the Picture Window,” which described suburban America as a “matriarchal society,” with the average husband “a woman-bossed, inadequate, money-terrified neuter” and the average wife a “nagging slob.” Anti-mom rhetoric was so pervasive that even Friedan recycled some of this ideology in “The Feminine Mystique” — including the repellent and now-discredited notion that overly devoted mothers turned their sons into homosexuals.

Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history at Evergreen State College, is the author of “A Strange Stirring: ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.”

via nytimes.com