Today’s apps grow bigger and faster than ever before.
Ten years ago, you had to move mountains to reach billions of people with an app. You had to finance huge capital outlays, master complex physical operations (racking and stacking football fields worth of hardware) and hire the world’s smartest engineers to develop software that could manage and scale across hundreds of thousands of servers.
Today, you can buy limitless infrastructure from Amazon by the drip. Powerful software platforms like Kubernetes are given away for free.
Open source software continues to proliferate in variety and sophistication. Code for an incredible range of features, functions, and services can be easily found and reused via GitHub. And mega services, like Amazon RDS, make once complex tasks (such as setting up and maintaining a database) as trivial as signing up for a service.
These building blocks allow new app makers to quickly and easily stand on the giant shoulders of the free software community.
Ironically, one of the biggest catalysts for innovation in history…was the authoring of a legal license.
Richard Stallman is the primary author of the GNU General Public License. Stallman advocated free software or free source code, launched the GNU Project, and founded the Free Software Foundation.
The Open Source Movement later branched from his free software movement. And then Linus Torvalds gave substance and power to the movement.
In perhaps the humblest beginning you could imagine to a major turn in the innovation cycle, Torvalds posted his intentions in an early newsgroup in 1991:
Hello everybody out there using minix –
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).
I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)
Linus ([email protected])
PS. Yes — it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.
He called his OS Linux.
Much of the software innovation we see in the world has been built (at least the server parts) atop the Linux platform.
Today, even greater platforms have emerged, with far more user reach. You can literally reach over a billion consumers by building an app within large platform ecosystems like iOS, Android, or Facebook.
We’ve reached an inflection point, a knee in the curve, where the rate of developing a killer app has accelerated by an order of magnitude over the prior decade.
That’s a big, important jump.
Appzillas are killer apps that transform industries and make competitors look antiquated overnight.
They can be apps on phones, laptops, servers, in the cloud, or anywhere apps can run. They can be chatbots, AI services, or voice operated.
They use the technology leverage built over the last few decades (e.g. smart phone sensors, AI algorithms, etc.) to move the earth and leap across longstanding barriers to entry.
Appzillas change the laws of supply and demand and radically reinvent customer experience. They are full of determination and substance and eat over-priced and overvalued unicorns for lunch. They inhabit the dreams of entrepreneurs and VCs, and the nightmares of Luddites and legacy chiefs.
As the innovation cycle continues to accelerate, Appzillas will emerge and grow faster than ever.
Welcome to the future, where Appzillas rule the world.
The only question is: Will you ride an Appzilla or get eaten by one?
If you’d like to learn more about the frameworks I’ve used to drive disruptive innovation and build multi-billion dollar software products, sign up for updates on the launch of my first book, Disrupt or Die: What the World Needs to Learn from Silicon Valley to Survive the Digital Era, and get the first few chapters now.
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