Nivi : The Next ?Killer App? Will Be Developed on Apple?s OS X

Interesting insight, but it’s hard to say. I use and love OS X myself, and most of my friends who are great programmers also use Macs as their personal computers. But I don’t think companies will be moving from Linux to OSX as their development platforms. Cost is one of the reason, but it’s not as important as ISV software support. The tools I use at work from Synopsys or models from Denali don’t work in OS X. It’s a catch-22, ISVs won’t support OSX until a majority of their customers want it, but their customers can’t buy Macs instead of Dell (that runs Linux) before the ISVs support OS X. For software companies, they also won’t switch to Macs unless their customers use them, similar situation there.

So if the next Killer App will be a home-grown or open source software, and there were some successful ones like Napster, this might be true. Or it would take a startup focused on OS X to do this. (hmm… I need an idea…)

Not that many software impress me anymore, but I really liked Groove. It was the coolest thing in 2001 when I was able to browse the web with my friends at Trilogy to decide where to go eat, share files, etc etc. I guess Microsoft likes it too and they’re going to integrate something like Groove into Outlook. It never took off as a Killer App though.

Oh yeah, I met Chunka Mui at a Diamond Technology all-hands and got a signed copy of the Killer App book. (I seriously considered joining that firm at one point)