I was randomly checking the Wikipedia entry for killer apps – apps that were so good that they single-handedly made people buy a particular hardware platform just to run them (Wii Sports for Nintendo Wii, Super Mario 64 for Nintendo 64, and so on).

There are some interesting nuggets in there I didn’t know, like Sibelius (music software) being a system seller for the British computer Acorn Archimedes, Xevious doing the same for Famicom (I had no idea Xevious, as beautiful as it is, was so huge!), and Steve Jobs focusing so much on making calls on the first iPhone. How quickly we started taking visual voicemail for granted…

But I was surprised not to see killer apps for Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, or even Mac OS X. Does the concept of killer apps not work anymore? Is iMessage a killer app for those who want blue bubbles, but it’s much harder for us to know that?

(I’m also curious about a parallel list of botched updates: Digg in 2010, Sonos in 2024, the “simplified” iMovie ’08 and Final Cut Pro X, Liquid Glass, as some of them ended up being anti-killer apps. I don’t immediately see anything like this online, but it could be an interesting series of posts to analyze those more carefully, going past schadenfreude or ridicule.)

Also, it made me think of one of my favourite ads. It’s for VisiCalc, the first computer spreadsheet, and the first-ever killer app. The ad was unassuming, small, in a corner of a 1979 computer magazine. But, in hindsight, what a prescient and brilliant question: How did you ever do without it?

We take spreadsheets for granted, too, but chills. Literal chills.