On Killer Apps And On Co-operation
The early eighties saw a Cambrian explosion¹ of computers for home use. Dubbed micro-computers or home computers, they had fancy names like ZX-Spectrum, Acorn, Micro-Professor, TRS-80, or Apple. They were the ultimate gadget of the time.
But what to do with them?
In 1978, a student at Harvard Business School, Dan Bricklin, watched his professor present a financial model that was ruled with vertical and horizontal lines, writing formula and data in the cells. At that moment, the idea for the electronic spreadsheet was born. Visicalc and its descendants (Excel being the best known), became the killer app for the new device. For some time, Visicalc, at a price of $100,-, was the main reason to buy an Apple II (with a price tag between $2000 and $10.000). It was the answer to the question: what do we apply this new device to?
But why did Visicalc become the killer application for the Apple II?
A spreadsheet program is not tied to a particular use, other than in the most general of terms. First, one must set up a specific calculation model — a “worksheet”. Then, numbers and other data can be entered and results observed. The two phases can have quite different groups of users. We might dub the former ‘modellers’ and the latter ‘end users’. But, importantly, modellers are not programmers. Some end users create models themselves; on the other extreme, some modellers build entire programs around their worksheets. There is a continuum here, from programmers to end users. Some call this ‘end user programming’.
Stepping back, we see that calculation models are an extremely common facet of life. Whether it is calculating the cost price of a product, or drawing up the budget for the football club, or any of the thousands of calculations on a small scale; approaching some part of the world in numeric terms is something we are taught in primary school and do throughout our lives. It is also something we’ve literally been doing for ages. The spreadsheet program merely made it possible to support these practices, in all their variety, with that new device, the personal computer.
The spreadsheet program does not limit us to a particular model of calculation. We can shape a worksheet to our liking, much like we shape our lives in our own personal way in countless other respects. It’s versatility fits our creativity and the endless variations between us, our interests and our work.
Today we have another new thing on our hands: the internet. What to do with it? It is not so much a device, as an infrastructure. So we cannot cast it as a personal tool, like we did with the computer (dubbed the most versatile tool ever, or a conceptual Swiss-Army knife). It might be tempting to say that Facebook, or the likes of AirBnB and Uber, are todays killer-apps. But these applications fall short of the spreadsheet program in an important way.
To start with, we don’t see a division of labor between modellers and end users in Facebook, AirBnB or one of the others, on any important scale. One might argue that Wiki software allows end user programming, but be honest: one can structure a wiki to one’s own liking, but it will remain a wiki. Its usage does not change. Each of these internet programs support a single, particular behaviour. They are fixed in their functions.
What kind of functions are these?
If we step back again and look at all things popular on the internet we see one basic pattern recur over and over again: co-operation. AirBnB supports co-operation between vacationers and property owners; Uber between taxi drivers and passengers; Ebay between buyers and sellers, etcetera. In this respect word processors or spreadsheets differ in another important way from programs on the internet. The former support individual work, while the latter support co-operation.
Obviously, co-operation is an extremely common facet of life, too. Like calculation models, there are endless forms and varieties of co-operation. But while spreadsheets enable us, through end user programming, to support any form of calculation, there is no such program on the internet that enables us to support any form of co-operation.
That non-existing program could be the ‘killer app’ for the internet.
When one analyses the technical structure of the big internet applications, one finds the same architecture over and over again. Invariably, there will be a central data silo and end user programs to enter and access that data. It will not come as a surprise that the tools of the trade and the ready-made building components used by IT practitioners allow them to quickly construct such programs.
The variation is in the functions to support a particular form of co-operation.
Perspectives is a new method to design co-operation patterns. Perspectives deals precisely with variations of forms of co-operation. Perspect IT, the company behind the method, also builds a new software stack, to run these models. The base of this stack is the Perspectives Distributed Runtime (PDR). Obviously, Perspectives Models, being models of co-operation, should run on ‘the internet’ rather than on individual computers. A model makes it possible to ‘apply’ the internet to some particular form of co-operation. In this sense, a Perspective model is an application for the internet to support co-operation.
We therefore prefer to perceive ‘the internet’ as a single device, or infrastructure. As our Perspectives models are its applications, the question arises: what then is the PDR in relation to the internet?
We like to think of it as an operating system.
An operating system provides the base for the software stack of an individual computer. Applications run on top of it. The PDR provides the base for a software stack of the internet, considered as a device to apply to co-operation.
We therefore call the PDR a Co-Operating System. It is the operating system for the World Computer!
This column is part two of a series. The first column is Stop Talking About Data! Here is the series introduction.
¹ Cambrian Explosion: a geological period in which all the main designs of currently living organisms came into being — and many that have perished since.