225 In Pursuit of the Software Holy Grail

According to the legend, the cup holding the wine Jesus toasted his friends with at his Last Supper the next day held some of his blood from the crucifixion. Joseph of Arimethea had possession of that cup and wound up in Britain. Whereupon it was "lost." In 1182 a poem was circulated with the story of the Holy Grail. It was bound up with the Arthur legends and then was found in a Monty Python video and later the prize of Indiana Jones (and the Last Crusade). In 1979, Dan Bricklin connected a spreadsheet for the new personal computer product, and the pursuit of the Holy Grail was transformed in the computer age to the pursuit of the killer app. We still live in the age of the pursuit of the killer app. IT companies with their IoT and Edge compute married to predictive analytics thought they found that Killer App in predictive maintenance. I think that stopping with predictive maintenance as THE app is far too shortsighted. There is far more to be gained by combining with more applications that will help make manufacturing more profitable for the enterprise.