Felipe Lopes

We have noticed in the past few years/months that some tech writers are presenting some pattern after the launch of each new application. The pattern is a obsessive search to find a application (usually old and very famous/ important) tht will be killed by the new one.

I don’t remember exactly when this started but here are some of the most commented the last year. Cuil, Twitter, Wolfram.

You can call me coward to not mention this while they’re being launched (that time I wasn’t writing yet), but my pourpose here is not say just that everyone that wrote those things were wrong.

Probably they were motivated to the will of hit the target and be the first one to “detect” that that new application really destroyed that “giant” (like google, wikipedia) and then post again saying “I predicted this much time ago, look <link>”. 

Even wikipedia, Yes1, yes2, wikipedia. 

The guys that usually say “%s killer” (%s is C syntax to “insert string here”) as mentioned by cellis in Hacker News have to think a little bit more before write these things, because they just don’t even think about the subject before write.

When Wolfram Alpha was launched I think there were posted more than 1 time each second in blogs that it would be the google killer and the bloggers don’t even thought that it is much more mathematical and direct response oriented then google, so their purpose is different and they can’t kill each other.

And wikipedia have a different concept of knowledge, that is based in the knowledge of every person that uses it.

So please, let’s stop trying finding THESE killers. If you want to find killers, be a detective/inspector/cop.