{"id":318,"date":"2008-08-03T05:14:46","date_gmt":"2008-08-03T13:14:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=318"},"modified":"2009-09-23T21:17:11","modified_gmt":"2009-09-24T05:17:11","slug":"clean-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=318","title":{"rendered":"Clean Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My best thinking seems to be done in the shower.  Yester-day, in the shower, I came up with the idea for what may in fact be a <em>killer app<\/em>.<\/p> <p>The thing that distinguishes a killer app is not that it provides an excellent solution to a problem so much as that it provides an acceptable solution to an excellent problem.  That is to say that a killer app <em>may<\/em> not have ideally efficient code, but manages to do something very desirable that other programs pretty much aren't doing at all.<\/p> <p>Some time ago, I wrote a simple pair of programs for the use of <a href=\"http:\/\/mocketymock.com\/\">the Woman of Interest<\/a> and myself.  Their functionality is <em>very<\/em> limited, and they were written under an assumption that now seems more dubious.  So I was thinking about how to rewrite them into something more powerful, and quickly developed the general idea for the hypothetical app.<\/p> <p>Later, I returned a phone call from my friend Phillip (a programmer), and during the course of our conversation sketched the idea for him, telling him that I would want to discuss it at some future date.  But Phillip quickly got very actively interested, and discovered that I had coherent answers for related <em>programming<\/em> questions. (What I <em>don't<\/em> have are answers for some of the <em>marketing<\/em> problems.) Basically, he wouldn't let go of the subject, and we ended-up talking for hours.  Phillip had one excellent technical suggestion about how to improve the app.  He's planning to research potential sources of competition, and then get back to me.<\/p> <p>The nature of the app is such that, if some party produces a decent implementation and gets a significant number of users before anyone <em>else<\/em> produces a decent implementation, then that party can probably profit for years, by virtue of <em>path dependency<\/em>.  But, if a well-funded rival recognized the potential market <em>before<\/em> there were already a substantial number of users for the app, then that rival might be able to get utterly displace the first party.  Hence, I'll remain <em>annoyingly vague<\/em> about the idea, until I either abandon it or have product ready to move.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My best thinking seems to be done in the shower. Yester-day, in the shower, I came up with the idea for what may in fact be a killer app. The thing that distinguishes a killer app is not that it provides an excellent solution to a problem so much as that it provides an acceptable [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,5,4],"tags":[332,333,250],"class_list":["post-318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-information-technology","category-personal","category-public","tag-killer-apps","tag-phillip","tag-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}