Neither users nor investors are particularly interested in being pitched with ‘the Semantic Web’ or ‘RDF’ or ‘triples’; they want applications and solutions. The fact that the Semantic Web is at work behind the scenes to make those applications and solutions ‘better’, cheaper, more scalable or whatever is clearly important, but shouldn’t be the opening gambit in conversation. ^
The killer app in the 1970s was Visicalc.
In the 1980s, it was the hybrid desktop publish-word processor.
In the 1990s, it was the web browser and Windows XP, the first operating system to truly standardize the desktop computing experience and make it stable. These two tamed the Wild West of computing and gave it a standard interface.
For the 00s, and beyond, it’s going to be a data manipulator. This may be the operating system itself, allowing data in portability formats to be shared between applications so that one copy can be updated and all other copies follow. It may be an application like Microsoft Word, that allows you to embed and work with enough formats to hack just about anything into a final form, and then send it to your SharePoint server.
Or it could come from the open source world, where people are readying interesting apps to deal with the new possibilities of XML and RDF.
I can’t wait to see this new killer app. The future is bright with possibility.