The authors show entrepreneurs and corporate executives how to identify, develop, and bring to market successful products through "digital strategies" based on using the Internet and the value of creative chaos. You don't have to look far to see that technology is driving today's economy. Turn on CNBC , open The Economist , scan the Wall Street Journal --you'll find that technology is the prime force creating growth in almost every industry. In Unleashing the Killer App , authors Larry Downes and Chunka Mui look at the dynamics of technological change and its potential to create "killer apps." The authors describe a killer app as a product or service that "wind up displacing unrelated older offerings, destroying and re-creating industries far from their immediate use, and throwing into disarray the complex relationships between business partners, competitors, customers, and regulators of markets." Examples of killer apps throughout history include the Welsh longbow, the pulley, the compass, moveable type, and the Apple Macintosh. And today, with our increasingly networked economy (for example, the World Wide Web), killer apps are appearing all around us. Downes and Mui argue that the dominant trend behind the proliferation of killer apps is a combination of Moore's Law, which states that the processing power of the CPU doubles every 18 months, and Metcalfe's Law, which observes that the value of a network increases dramatically with each node that's added to it. These two laws are fundamentally changing how businesses interact with each other and with their customers. To exploit these changes, the authors outline 12 points for designing a digital strategy to help you identify and create killer apps in your own organization. The book includes dozens of examples of how killer apps were discovered and implemented. Unleashing the Killer App provides an excellent framework for rethinking the nature of business in today's wired economy. No matter the size of your company or what it does--health care, publishing, or fast food--there's probably a killer app lurking somewhere. This book will help you find it. Highly recommended. --Harry C. Edwards "'Just do it' is the message here...Readers are presented with a 12-step 'Digital Strategy' for transforming any organization from cringing-reactionary, dreading the arrival of the next killer app, to flexing-visionary, aggressively preparing to hatch and unleash future killer apps.... [The authors] write with an in-your-face style that airs out the mustiness from a book aimed at business execs." -- San Jose Mercury News, May 3, 1998 "For the uninitiated, this book is a great primer on the forces driving the new economy: the surge in computing power, the exponentially rising value of networks, and the plunging cost of transactions." and "The authors, both consultants, offer a dozen design principles of relevance to businesses small and large alike." -- Tom Petzinger, The Wall Street Journal, June 22, 1998 "For those in traditional, small-medium sizes companies wondering if they should take the plunge into e-whatever, these concrete examples will be very useful in showing both the peril and the potential." -- Upside, July 1998 "It's rare that a business book distinguishes itself among the pack of cookie-cutter manifestos. KILLER APP rises above with skillfully written analysis and compelling company profiles that combine to map today's digital landscape." -- The Industry Standard, May 11, 1998 "Provocatively counterintuitive....truly eye-opening." -- Technology Review, July-August 1998 "Unleashing the Killer App...is a best-of-breed primer for executives cramming for the new economy." -- Wired, May 1998 A Business Week Bestseller. and A New York Times Business Bestseller. When technologies, products, and services converge in radical, creative new ways, a "killer app" can emerge-a new application so powerful that it transforms industries, redefines markets, and annihilates the competition. The compass, the steam engine, the cotton gin, and the Model T were all killer apps that sent shock waves through the social, political, and economic systems of their time. Today's killer apps spring from the digital realm: the personal computer, e-mail, and the World Wide Web have profoundly influenced and even altered society far beyond their intended use. Tempted by the promise of such devastating power, companies large and small, from vast multinationals to lean entrepreneurial start-ups, are remaking themselves into organizations that nurture killer apps rather than succumb to them. How is it done? In this groundbreaking new book, strategists Downes and Mui argue that managers must abandon many of their most revered planning and control processes. The most commonly used tools for setting and executing strategy, artifacts of the industrial age, make for inadequate weapons in today's digital arena. Leaders must replace control and consistency, contend Downes an