Chunka Mui sent me a preview copy of his and Paul Carroll’s new book. While his theme is “How Large Companies Can Out-Innovate Start-ups” to me the fascinating thread in the book to me was bringing out the impact of a single idea or “app” across multiple industries.
They look at how the Google autonomous car is impacting “carmakers, their dealers, rental car companies, body shops, insurers, health care providers”. By their estimate the impact is “$2 trillion in revenue each year in the United States alone”. The impact beyond the US may be even more pronounced as many German and Japanese manufacturers already have adaptive cruise control, GPS guidance, camera based recognition and other driverless building blocks already in production models. The authors could also have looked at impact of urban planning as cities and counties look at impact on traffic lights and speeding fine revenues as more cars become driverless.
If they had waited a bit longer, they could have forecast the impact the recently disclosed Amazon PrimeAir drone delivery could have on logistics, grocery chains, law enforcement, national security and other impact points.
If you look back to Chunka’s 2000 book on Killer Apps, you can the evolution from limited, localized features in apps to now impact across multiple industries and geographies. We need to change our expectations of what we expect from application software and even industry definitions as we dream of new possibilities. Google and Amazon certainly don’t intend to stop at cars and drones.
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