Killer App

At the peak of the dot-com bubble, a system engineer takes a job with a high-tech company. His mission is to sell the "killer app", a piece of software that’s supposedly so good it will make all its competitors obsolete. His problem is that the killer app doesn’t work.

It tells a story similar to Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Bukowski’s Post Office, Melville’s White Jacket, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, using sharply delineated characters and work environments to illuminate social conditions and human nature. The characters and situations it portrays -- because they’re carefully observed and accurately described -- are similar to those that have made the Dilbert comic strip popular, and the book will appeal to the same audience.