We live in a very dangerous world. Once again ISIS has shocked the world with violence at a new extreme for the 21st century and still there are people who want to settle scores by shooting adults and children.

Despite the incalculable sorrow caused by these acts of violence the IT software and development industry feels that it is quite OK to refer to ‘killer apps’. I’ve also seen the term used by web and intranet managers. It is both instructive and of great concern to carry out a search on Google for “killer apps” and find the number of results indexed in just the last 24 hours. Apart from anything else the term makes semantic nonsense. Just think about it for a moment.

To me it is a sign of marketing managers with both a serious lack of language skills and an equally serious lack of social responsibility.

The next time you are offered a ‘killer app’ you might want to ask the vendor exactly why they have chosen to describe the app in that way and what other adjectives they discarded in the selection process.

Martin White