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Tim O'Reilly
Various Things I've Written
I've started to have trouble tracking down my various, scattered writings and interviews on the Net myself, so I decided to create a page where I could find my own words when I wanted to refer to them. I figured some other people might want to look at this archive as well. If you're interested in even more than you find here, check out my official bio, my short official bio, and my personal bio.
Recent Interviews/ArticlesLive video chat with Inc magazine readers -- May 2010. This webcast covered many of the same issues as the Inc. Magazine profile, but also topical issues such as Facebook privacy. Inc. did something very clever, breaking the hour-long video into short, topical chunks. Here's one of them, in which I comment on the idea of work-life balance and the pursuit of profits vs. the pursuit of passion and meaning. I said "They don't need to be balanced, they need to be integrated."
The other short segments include:
The Oracle of Silicon Valley -- The (Tim) O'Reilly Factor -- May 2010. Publishers' Weekly interviewed me recently about the Tools of Change (ToC) conference in New York in February, 2010. This interview covers my views of the publishing industry, particularly ebooks, the devices, and the big three competing in this arena: Google, Apple, and Amazon. "When you have a new market, it takes a while for the economic engines of it to become clear... But we already have a real economy of ebooks. Are there tradeoffs? Yes. There is some piracy, of course. But I look also at the opportunities. More than 60% of our e-book sales come from countries where we have no physical book distribution, so we have this huge expansion of our market as a result of e-books." "That's part of our vision with ToC, to get publishers together to share what works. That's why we spend a lot of time evangelizing the idea that it's important for publishers to share data, to tell their stories, talk about innovations that work, and to be challenged." In a more direct way, my presentation at the ToC conference itself covers the challenges of publishers in the digital era. What do publishers need to be really good at? "I'm not saying not to be creative and innovative, but a lot of what you do (for authors) is the boring stuff. You need to be really good at production, distribution, pricing, channel management, marketing, and sales." This is one of the reasons I give for why I think that there will always be publishers. Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists -- April 2010. Steven Levy's review of hacker culture, on the occasion of the 25th re-release of his seminal book Hackers. Steven kindly includes me among the luminaries he discusses (even though I wasn't in the original book). MySQL Conference 2010: Keynote Address: The Internet of Things -- April 2010. The future of data and open source: Where is it taking us in the age of the cloud? "The future is inconceivable and we need to get our brains around that future... we haven't seen far enough into the future. At O'Reilly we try to find the people who are living in the future already." "The data itself is becoming the source of building new applications... (The future is) real time cloud based intelligence delivered to mobile apps. Build for the data based world that you can see coming." The following two posts are the ones I mention in the address above.State of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars -- April 2010. As I wrote last month, it is becoming increasingly clear that the internet is becoming not just a platform, but an operating system. The question is whether a single company will put together a single, vertically-integrated platform that is sufficiently compelling to developers to enable the kind of lock-in we saw during the personal computer era, or whether, Internet-style, we will instead see services from multiple providers horizontally integrated via open standards. The State of the Internet Operating System -- March 2010. Ask yourself for a moment, what is the operating system of a Google or Bing search? What is the operating system of a mobile phone call? What is the operating system of maps and directions on your phone? What is the operating system of a tweet? I've been talking for years about "the internet operating system", but I realized I've never written an extended post to define what I think it is, where it is going, and the choices we face. This is that missing post. Twitter as a Force for Good -- April, 2010. At the Twitter Chirp Conference, I lead a panel discussion with Katie Stanton from the State Department, Patrick Meier from Ushahidi, and Anil Dash from Expert Labs. We talk about how government can use technology for addressing policy issues and even manage international crises, as was done brilliantly in Haiti. "I hope their stories will inspire you to think not just about whether you can make money... but about whether you can make a difference." Location Debate at Where 2.0 2010 -- Mike Arrington and I chat, and though the location debate never occurs, we cover some interesting topics. "We both agree that competition is good for people.... (But) If you go head on at a very strong opponent you are going to lose... attack where you can be strong." Mike, as a reporter, however, likes to watch the giants going at each other. Chris Vein and Tim O'Reilly on City Data -- March 2010. Chris Vein discusses with me how releasing data to the public has generated new applications. The city of San Francisco hopes to see this kind of synergy in six key areas: Transportation, Crime, Public Safety, Commerce, Health, and Recreation & Parks. "There is an incredible rich store of data that we have never looked at before... we are releasing that data to the public. From that release, we have seen about 30 applications... that we don't have the money to develop." Six Years in the Valley -- March 2010. This interview with the Economist at their Innovation event in Berkeley, March 2010, covers the origins of the Web 2.0 Conference, the rise of advertising as a business model, and the core lesson of Web 2.0: that users add value. I talk about lessons from Google, the idea of applications that get better the more people use them, and what that means for the future of the web. A particularly interesting moment came when the Economist asked me why there were so few big Web 2.0 successes. "It's too early to tell... Roll back the clock to the 80s, when there were hundreds if not thousands of personal computer software companies. And most of them failed. Would you say that there was a paradox in the software industry business model because most companies were not able to actually become successful?" The Future of Face Recognition -- March 2010. Moritz Metz interviews me about Google Goggles, Face recognition, the future of AR and post privacy. "I think a lot of this (face recognition) is going to become commonplace... Social apps is a huge repository of data collected online. We are going to find new uses for it... and we'll get used to it." Open Source: Education as a Platform -- January 2010. I discuss the University as an open source platform: What are the possibilities? "When choice is brought to the marketplace, exciting things can happen." Cloud computing Explained: An interview with Tim O'Reilly -- January 2010. I explain cloud computing and it's interconnection with mobile computing, and how this ultimately connects to government data and crucial policy decisions that enable the future. "There are a lot of unchartered waters where everything is accessible to everyone. But I think that there are more benefits than risks." Interview with IBM's developerworks -- October 2008. I tell the O'Reilly Media story: its focus on innovators in the field, growth, goals for the future. "First of all, our basic methodology, as we've developed it over the years sort of through trial and error, is that we find interesting people who are innovating from the edge. And then we just watch and see what they do. So, for example, we have an event called foo camp... we invite these guys together with no program, and on the Friday night, they introduce themselves and then there's a bunch of big whiteboards with space for talks, and they put up the talks that they want to give. And we watch that and we say, 'Wow -- what are they wanting to talk about?'" OpenBusiness: An Interview with Tim O'Reilly -- April 2006. OpenBusiness spoke with Tim about the evolution of the web and Web 2.0. In this interview, Tim re-emphasizes the most important points of Web 2.0, talks about the evolutionary relationship between open and free, and shares his views on "bionic software." Wired Profile: The Trend Spotter -- October 2005. Wired writer Steven Levy visited Tim at his home in Sebastopol and wrote this profile, expounding on the history of O'Reilly Media and the O'Reilly Radar. What Is Web 2.0 -- September 2005. Born at a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International, the term "Web 2.0" has clearly taken hold, but there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means. Some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom. I wrote this article in an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0. GAO Report: Tim O'Reilly's Letter to Congressman Wu -- September 2005. In March of 2004, Congressman David Wu of Oregon made a request to the General Accounting Office (GAO) for a report on the high cost of college textbooks. The GAO report was recently released, and confirmed the fact that the price of college textbooks has nearly tripled from 1986 to 2004. I wrote this letter to Congressman Wu referencing O'Reilly's solution: SafariU. The O'Reilly Radar 2005 -- March 2005. The opening keynote for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference was delivered jointly with Rael Dornfest. It opens with Rael's "rules for remixing," segues into an abbreviated version of my "internet era business model design patterns" talk (which I also gave at Eclipsecon), and then finishes with some other things that are on our radar. The slides (PDF) are on the ETech presentations page. There's also a good summary of my comments on Alice Taylor's blog. Get Your Hands Dirty! -- January 2005. Hackers of all stripes refuse to just take what they’re given. They’re driven to remake it, and getting there is more than half the fun. In the latest O'Reilly catalog, Tim writes about the host of new books and products within that celebrate the hacker impulse. We've got the information you need to hack, remix, and master technology at home and at work. So go on, get your hands dirty! Read/Write Web Interview: Web 2.0 -- November 2004. In Part 1 of this Read/Write Web interview, I talk with Richard MacManus about the Web 2.0 Conference, the relationships between Apple and the web and Microsoft and the web, and data ownership and lock-in. In Part 2, we explore business models for web content, including discussion of RSS. And Part 3 focuses on eBooks, social networking, collaboration, and Remix culture. Pick the Hat to Fit the Head -- October 2004. Larry Wall once said, “Information wants to be valuable,” and the form in which information is presented contributes to that value. At O'Reilly Media, we offer a variety of ways to get your technical information. Tim O'Reilly talks about it in his quarterly letter for the O'Reilly Catalog. MacDirectory Interview: Tim Loves His G4! -- September 2004. I talked with Simon Hayes at MacDirectory.com about the success of the Mac platform, Apple's innovative support of digital media and networking (exemplifying David Stutz's "software above the level of a single device"), and what O'Reilly Media has in store for Mac users and administrators. Technology and Tools of Change -- June 2004. Building the next generation of technology won't be easy, and will require developers, entrepreneurs, and the customers they serve to learn new skills. O'Reilly has a collection of new and favorite tools for building the future, including a new "Technology & Society" book series, a new "Web 2.0--Web as Platform" conference, and a new print-on-demand, custom books service called SafariU. Open Source Paradigm Shift -- June 2004. This article is based on a talk that I first gave at Warburg-Pincus' annual technology conference in May of 2003. Since then, I have delivered versions of the talk more than twenty times, at locations ranging from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the UK Unix User's Group, Microsoft Research in the UK, IBM Hursley, British Telecom, Red Hat's internal "all-hands" meeting, and BEA's eWorld conference. I finally wrote it down as an article for an upcoming book on open source,"Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software," edited by J. Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. R. Lakhani and to be published by MIT Press in 2005. State of the Computer Book Market -- February 2004. We've launched a new market research group at O'Reilly. Its mission is to develop quantifiable metrics for the state of technology adoption. Aided by Nielsen BookScan sales data, which shows us trends in what people are buying, we're able to evaluate trends in technology adoption that should help us do a better job of forecasting technology growth patterns. In this letter I wrote for O'Reilly's Spring 2004 Catalog, I share some of our analysis, something I expect to do more of in the coming year. A FOSDEM Interview: Reinventing Open Source -- February 2004. I'll be speaking at FOSDEM this year on the subject of how next-generation applications are changing the rules of the computing game. In this interview, I talk about O'Reilly's book publishing program, past and present, and my goal to create the maximum value for users, developers, and everyone in the software ecosystem. Today that means coming to grips with the way the computer landscape is changing, giving up old open source battles from the 1980s and 1990s, and focusing on how we might reinvent open source in this age of the Internet. (Slides from my talk are now available in PDF: The Open Source Paradigm Shift [4.4MB].) My fundamental premise is that the world we all grew up in--the world of both Microsoft and the Free Software Foundation--is fundamentally challenged by the Internet. The Internet (not Linux) is the greatest triumph to date of the open source approach, yet it has changed the rules of software deployment so fundamentally that many of the techniques embraced by the open source community as first principles don't necessarily give the desired results. We need to reinvent open source in the age of the Internet. My talk gives some suggestions for what we need to think about. We're All Mac Users Now -- January 2004. Wired News talked to a bunch of folks (including me) for comments on the 20th anniversary of the Mac. Nice words from all of us about just how important the Mac has been to the computer industry. Apple has been able to reinvent itself because it has what is, at bottom, an aesthetic vision, rather than one that is solely based on profit and loss. Like Shaw's proverbial "unreasonable man," they try to bend the world to their vision. And they articulate that vision consistently, and persistently. The Future of Technology and Proprietary Software -- December 2003. In celebration of its 25th anniversary, InfoWorld did a feature on where technology has been and where it's headed: 25 Years of Technology. Tim O'Reilly answered some questions for that piece about the future of technology and proprietary software. Many of his comments were included in the article, but here they are in their entirety, as well. |
Tim's Radar Blog Posts
More on O'Reilly Radar Follow Tim on Twitter
More on Twitter Archive of Interviews/ArticlesOrganized in reverse chronological order within each subject, with a brief extract from each piece so you can get the flavor without actually following each link.
Ask TimWhy Is the Web the Way It Is Today? -- December 2005. In what direction could the internet have gone if it were not for the FSF/GNU movement and how would the internet have looked today? Tim O'Reilly offers his perspective. Is Perl Still Relevant? -- July 2005. With the emergence of .NET, J2EE, Python, PHP, et. al, has Perl lost its niche as a scripting glue language? Tim O'Reilly comments. When will Perl 6 ever get done? -- August 2004. It's difficult to make predictions about when Perl 6 will be released. For one thing, Perl is still and always under development; for another, there's no rush. perl.com editor Simon Cozens writes that if you have a pressing need for Perl 6, more developers are welcome. RepKover Binding -- March 2004. O'Reilly has good--no, great news about RepKover lay-flat binding, the very durable and flexible binding method that allows the interior of a book to "float" free from its cover and lay flat open on your table. Amazon and Open Source -- February 2004. Amazon realized early on that amazon.com was more than just a book site, more in fact than just an e-commerce site. It was beginning to become an e-commerce platform. Open source has been a key part of the Amazon story, and although Amazon has closed code, it has created its own "architecture of participation" that may be even richer than that of many open source software development communities. Did Amazon Listen? -- December 2003. After all that controversy over Amazon's 1-Click patent, what's this about them receiving a patent for new features on their ordering forms? Tim explains that Jeff Bezos never said he'd stop filing for patents, but that he'd think twice before enforcing them in a potentially offensive way. O'Reilly's E-Book Strategy -- November 2003. O'Reilly's e-book strategy is to build a flexible data repository supporting XML web services that will allow us to deliver content into a variety of channels. The O'Reilly Network, which offers online content in bite-size chunks, is the "smaller" part of the strategy; Safari, a database of thousands of books that you can search across, is the "bigger" part. Are "how to" books archaic? -- November 2003. A reader asked us about O'Reilly's vision for future books given the rate of change in technology and the growth of the Internet as an information source. Tim says "how to" books will only become more important as the paradigm shift that's taking place in computing leads us into uncharted territory. What happened to BountyQuest? -- October 2003. What ever happened to BountyQuest, the web site where people could post large rewards for documents proving prior art on a patent, thus proving a patented invention is not really new? E-Books and P2P -- September 2003. Why doesn't O'Reilly offer stand-alone e-books? As an advocate for P2P, wouldn't it follow that Tim would make O'Reilly books available for download? Tim talks about P2P, copyright, the value of giving away content, e-books as a business model, and the potential of O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf. |
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