Let’s Kill the “Killer” Term

I’m tired of hearing regarding the next [insert a firm or product name] killer.

It seems that every week another “something killer” product is launched.

There have been dozens of supposed “iPhone killers”.

And a nice handful of “Google killer” search engines.

And today comes word of what’s being referred to internally at Facebook as the “Gmail Killer”.

I’m actually amazed that Facebook could release a Google Gmail killer, since I thought that Google was supposed to have by now released a “Facebook Killer” in the form of Buzz. Facebook ought to be dead by now. Oh, and it ought to prepare for another assassination attempt.

There sure is a lot of supposed killing going on out there. But the thing is they never kill what everyone states they will. They rarely make a dent. The real “killer” applications out there tend to take the general public by surprise. Like the iPod, which basically killed every existing MP3 player in the market. The iPod was truly a killer product. Sadly, the word is so overused these days that the term has lost all meaning.

Now, back to working on my DomainQuestions.com killer…

[The original version of this article was titled “Let’s Kill the ‘Killer’ Moniker”. As Mr. Berryhill pointed out, that was a poor choice of words given that Moniker is the name of a domain registrar. I certainly would not want the registrar killed.]