Peter Coffee’s 25 Killer Apps of All Time
Peter Coffee’s list seems about right, though Mac OS X is an OS and a GUI shell, not an app. Throw that away and there’s room for one more.
The only mistake here is the inclusion of Internet Explorer 1.0. That was a horrid product no one used. That should be replaced by Mosaic 1.0, which was far more significant to the development of the Web, and likely had many more users to boot. In fact, few versions of IE had any real significance. Mostly they just copied other browsers and got bundled with Windows. Just maybe you could count IE 5 as a killer app, since that’s the one that introduced XMLHttpRequest, which would become the basis for AJAX and Web 2.0. That’s probably the only significant innovation Microsoft’s ever made in the browser space. But IE 1.0 simply does not belong in this list.
February 24th, 2007 at 4:28 PM
Interesting how his list is all client-side apps.
Nowhere does he mention the server app that’s serving all those pages to the “killer” web browsers. Yet if it weren’t for the servers, there wouldn’t even be a web.
How about a list of the 25 INVISIBLE Killer Apps of All Time?
Near the top of that list I’d have to put the airline scheduling and reservations systems. You know, that software that when it’s working, you never even think about, but when it fails you wonder how any airlines ever work at all.