Whilst there have been increased fractures in recent years, IT equipment and the support structures surrounding them have been remarkably consistent over the past three decades.
If a computer or other productivity tool does what you need it to, you tend to stick with it unless something else comes along that is demonstrably and more fully featured than the tools you are already using.
The new features that sell equipment are often known as killer applications, something that Microsoft has aggressively positioned its large language model agents to be for Windows in recent years, to mixed results.
This has inspired a rather interesting question: which piece of IT software changed business computing the most? Which application or program had the biggest impact?
To answer this, it is important to first explain why a popular piece of software is important, and how it may not always be the most obvious app which causes your company to buy into an ecosystem.
What Is A Killer App And Why Is It So Important?
The first place to start is by examining the idea of a killer application, often known simply as a killer app.
A killer app is a piece of software or a functionality so desirable that you would buy an entire piece of equipment just to run it.
Killer apps not only sell systems by themselves, but they encourage development on a particular platform and architecture, which in turn inspires more companies to buy into the same ecosystem and further increase sales.
For many offices in the 1990s, Microsoft Windows 95 was a killer app for computers as it made them extremely welcoming even for people who had never touched a keyboard before.
Meanwhile, a decade beforehand, Aldus PageMaker was the first successful desktop publisher ever sold, and it became so popular that it was the primary reason why Apple Macintosh computers were sold.
To this day, the iMac’s niche in graphic design is in many respects a direct consequence of the success of a single piece of software in 1985.
However, is there an application so groundbreaking that it single-handedly sold the concept of computers themselves to businesses?
What Was The Killer App For IT And Computers?
The reason why office staff use the computers, networks and office suites they do is a piece of software the majority of them have never used and may never have heard of.
In 1979, VisiCorp released VisiCalc, an early spreadsheet that not only became the reason to buy an Apple II, but also the reason why businesses should buy a computer at all.
Whilst far from the first piece of business software, or even the first computer accounting tool, VisiCalc was such a vitally important piece of software for accountants that companies were willing to buy the computer to go with it.
How Did VisiCalc Shape Modern IT?
Its ability to instantly recalculate rows and columns was something that handwritten ledgers simply could not do, and it became an epochal moment for businesses as a whole.
In this sense alone, for giving computers a purpose beyond research and general fascination, VisiCalc is already the reason why your business uses a computer for everyday computing tasks and the success it brought Apple is the reason why we all use smartphones.
However, it had an even bigger impact on the shape of modern IT in the unusual way it fell from grace.
The Rise Of Lotus 1-2-3 And The Modern PC
In 1981, the IBM 5150 was released, and whilst it was an immediate success and would become the standard template for almost all computers made in the decades afterwards, it was not initially the ubiquitous business machine it would quickly become.
VisiCalc was ported to the IBM PC and was an immediate success, but a focus on compatibility and ports to every microcomputer on the market meant that bugs and limitations found in the spreadsheet in 1979 were still around by 1983.
At the start of that same year, Lotus 1-2-3 released and made everything else obsolete almost immediately and contributed to the near-ubiquity of both it and IBM PCs in the business world, to the point that “PC compatible” and “1-2-3 compatible” were used interchangeably.
This had the rather unintentional effect of turning the PC from a single personal computer product into an open platform that any manufacturer could make.
This turned computers into a relatively universal good; the IBM PC and Microsoft PC-DOS eventually evolved into a wide range of Intel and AMD-powered computers using the same general design and running Microsoft Windows instead.
None of this would have happened were it not for a long-obsolete spreadsheet from 1979, which makes VisiCalc possibly the most important and influential IT tool of all time.