One of the marquee attractions at the MIT Media Lab is a camera that can take photographs of objects sitting out of sight, around a corner. It’s the result of years of sophisticated science. But the MIT researchers might have figured it out faster had they simply studied Tim O’Reilly. He’s been seeing around corners for decades now.
O’Reilly’s day job is heading O’Reilly Media, created in 1978, which began as a purveyor of distinctively friendly computer manuals and tech-focused books (full disclosure: O’Reilly Media published the reissue of my book “Hackers”). Later O’Reilly stretched the business to include conferences, epublishing, and a spin-off venture capital firm that has done seed rounds with the likes of Foursquare, Bitly, and Chumby. But the 58-year-old CEO is better known as a free-range proselytizer of the tech revolution. His ability to quickly identify nascent trends is unparalleled. It was O’Reilly who first figured out that programming was becoming a mass skill. O’Reilly who realized in 1993 that the Internet browser would broadly transform civilization, spurring him to form what was arguably the first web portal, the Global Network Navigator. O’Reilly who recognized that open source would be a liberating engine of innovation and so created books and conferences around that theme. O’Reilly who saw the rebirth of the web as a participatory medium and launched the influential Web 2.0 conference dedicated to promoting and plumbing that notion. O’Reilly who identified hackers as canaries in the coal mine of emerging technology, and O’Reilly who made a point of tapping the minds of such people—allowing his company to grasp and share the import of advances like Wi-Fi, big data, and the maker movement earlier than almost anyone else.
Wired caught up with the peripatetic CEO via Skype. He was in London, preparing for a conference presentation called “Open Societies, Open Economies.” Vintage O’Reilly.
Wired: Your new credo these days is “Create more value than you capture.” What does that mean?
Tim O’Reilly: Everybody wants to foster entrepreneurship, but we have to think about the preconditions for entrepreneurship. You grow great crops in great soil. And the soil is the commons. Increasingly, we have monopolistic companies that try to take as much as they can for themselves. And we have a patent and copyright regime that makes sure that nothing goes back into the commons unless by an extraordinary act of generosity. This is not fertile soil for innovation.
So many technologies start out with a burst of idealism, democratization, and opportunity, and over time they close down and become less friendly to entrepreneurship, to innovation, to new ideas. Over time the companies that become dominant take more out of the ecosystem than they put back in. We saw this happen with Microsoft. It started out with a big vision: How do we get a PC on every desk and in every home? It was profoundly democratizing. But when Microsoft got on top, it slowly started choking off the pathways to success for everybody else. It stopped creating more value than it captured.
Wired: So how do you turn that around?
O’Reilly: At our company, we do it by marketing big ideas instead of our own products. To promote change elsewhere, you start by talking. I once had a conversation with Eric Schmidt where I was urging him to consider the notion that “Create more value than you capture” might be a better metric for Google to use in judging its actions than “Don’t be evil.” One is measurable, the other more subjective. And Google does seem to think about this a lot. But generally there’s just not enough awareness of it. Pursuing this path is not only altruistic. If companies don’t think systemically enough—if they try to capture too much of the value—eventually innovation moves somewhere else.
Wired: If you could pick a company that needs to hear this, which would it be?
O’Reilly: Apple. They’re clearly on the wrong path. They file patent suits that claim that nobody else can make a device with multitouch. But they didn’t invent multitouch. They just pushed the ball forward and applied it to the phone. Now they want to say, “OK, we got value from someone else, but it stops now.” That attitude creates lockup in the industry. And I think Apple is going to lose its mojo precisely because they try to own too much.
Wired: How about Amazon? Is it a killer or an enabler?
O’Reilly: It’s both. Amazon is clearly trying to own the entire stack. They ate most of the retail part of the stack, and now they’re trying to eat the publisher part of the stack. On the other hand, Amazon is doing so many good things—their cloud-computing initiatives have been earthshaking, and I give Jeff Bezos great kudos for getting the publishing industry to move seriously toward ebooks. I am so impressed with them. I just wish they were a little less ruthless.
Wired: In the early days of the Obama administration, you predicted that Internet values would change government. But a lot of technology people got disenchanted by how hard it was to change things.
O’Reilly: I wouldn’t say they’re disenchanted but that they’re burned out. Everybody who goes into government gets somewhat chewed up in the process. Being a senior appointee is like being at a startup, only more so: You run into opposition from the entrenched oligopoly of contractors whose business model is to extract as much money from government as possible for doing as little as possible. At O’Reilly, when we first found out about the World Wide Web and recognized its potential, we went around to all the phone companies to get them to provide Internet access with the Global Network Navigator as a front end. They didn’t listen. And when we went to publishers to talk about pushing books online, they had zero interest. It’s very similar when you’re trying to bring new ideas to government. People are comfortable with what they’re doing, and they don’t see the future coming at them. There’s that great story in the book of Jeremiah where he’s been preaching and nobody’s paying attention, and he feels that he might as well be preaching to the ground. Well, I was out there being Jeremiah.
A History of Prescience
Tim O’Reilly has made a career out of spotting technology trends. Here’s his hit list. —Katie M. Palmer
Three years after earning his classics degree, O’Reilly cofounds O’Reilly & Associates, which writes technical guides for hardware companies.
O’Reilly & Associates begins retaining the rights to its manuals, which, as the company shifts more to publishing, evolve into the iconic “animal books” for software developers.
O’Reilly’s company releases Ed Krol’s The Whole Internet User’s Guide & Catalog, the publisher’s first million-copy best seller and arguably the first popular book about the Internet.
The Global Network Navigator, the first web portal and the first site to be supported by banner ads, is launched by O’Reilly & Associates. AOL buys it for $11 million in 1995.
The publisher holds the first of what will evolve into a massive ecosystem of developer conferences. In a 1998 meeting, attendees adopt the term open source, giving birth to the Open Source Summit.
O’Reilly writes an open letter protesting Amazon’s enforcement of its “one-click” technology patent. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos later joins O’Reilly’s call for patent reform.
The first issue of Make magazine, launched by O’Reilly cofounder Dale Dougherty, comes out. The next year, the first Maker Faire is held in San Mateo, California.
The company spins off O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, a “micro-VC” firm—larger than an angel fund, smaller than a traditional VC. Investments include Bitly, Codecademy, and Foursquare.
O’Reilly joins the board of directors of Code for America, a nonprofit that pairs programmers with city governments to help create a more efficient, open, and participatory bureaucracy.
Click the arrows to move through the timeline.
Wired: It sounds like that’s the thinking behind a project you advise, Code for America, which places programmers into city governments so they can build new applications and software.
O’Reilly: Yes, founder Jen Pahlka figured that instead of talking about how government should change, you have to demonstrate how to do it. The key output of Code for America is not apps, it’s culture change. The teams tackle projects that officials have been told will take years and cost millions, and they do it in six weeks. The people in government wind up asking, “What’s wrong with us?” It makes an impact.
Wired: You’re a publisher and big reader as well as a technologist. What is the future for books?
O’Reilly: Well, what kind of book do you mean? Because there are many, many things that were put into codices that have no particular reason to be books. Things like paper maps and atlases are just gone. Online dictionaries and online encyclopedias have killed printed dictionaries and encyclopedias. I collect how-to books of various kinds just because I want to have them. And certainly if there were a major disaster, a book could be a useful thing to have. But I don’t really give a shit if literary novels go away. They’re an elitist pursuit. And they’re relatively recent. The most popular author in the 1850s in the US wasn’t Herman Melville writing Moby-Dick, you know, or Nathaniel Hawthorne writing The House of the Seven Gables. It was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writing long narrative poems that were meant to be read aloud. So the novel as we know it today is only a 200-year-old construct. And now we’re getting new forms of entertainment, new forms of popular culture.
Wired: What about the argument that the Internet shortens attention spans and will kill the demand for long books?
O’Reilly: I do think that there are pieces of sustained argument that deserve to be in books, but most extended-argument books are inflated. You know, there are an awful lot of books that are pretty lousy, and I don’t think we need to be pissing and moaning because there are fewer of them. On the other hand, I’m listening now to a wonderful audiobook, The Swerve, about the rediscovery of Lucretius. It’s erudite, it’s well written, and I’m hanging on every word. So I think what will happen to long books is that people will have to get better at writing them.
Wired: Even though you were an early advocate of the web, did you understand its potential?
O’Reilly: I had no idea it would be as big as it became. I still remember in 1993 my partner Dale Dougherty originally wanted to do Global Network Navigator as a quarterly online magazine. And I remember saying to him, “Dale, I think people will have the web browser open on the desk every day. We have to think about them accessing it every day.” I had no idea that it would be every minute.
Wired: Just as you were early to recognize the Internet movement, you helped Dougherty start Make magazine in 2005, at the beginning of the DIY revolution.
O’Reilly: Yes, but the maker movement is more than just DIY. A lot of people’s thinking about the movement is stuck in the past. DIY is great—getting your hands on things, knowing how things work. But the maker movement is also about new possibilities of hardware, like putting multitouch screens on phones for the first time. Makers like Jeff Han at NYU were doing that. So you can say that the first great product to come out of the maker movement is Apple’s iPhone.
Wired: You also pioneered the ad hoc “unconference” with the Foo Camp, where around 200 “friends of O’Reilly” make up the agenda in real time. How did those start, and what have you learned from them?
O’Reilly: We did the very first Foo Camp in 2003. It was in the middle of the dotcom bust, and we had a lot of empty space. It was really for fun, a thank-you to all the people who had given us the gift of their time, attention, and ideas over the years. The output is not what we learn but what they learn. It goes back to creating more value than you capture. I love helping people make new connections. Heck, my daughter met her husband at Foo Camp!
Wired: While your company has done well, it never experienced the hypergrowth of other successful tech businesses. Do you ever look back and think, “Hey, I saw that first—why aren’t I a billionaire?”
O’Reilly: Not really. First of all, I’m very, very aware of the role of luck in all of that. It’s certainly true that if we had been different people, we could have done something. You know, there were a number of times when I passed up venture capital because I preferred to build something for the long term. I certainly have felt bad for some of my employees—they see people who joined some odd startup and became wealthy. We haven’t been able to monetize at the same level, but I feel really good about what I’ve accomplished and the choices I’ve made. I’ve seen too many O’Reilly employees who wanted to make their fortune and left for the startup world. And they joined two or three startups that proceeded to fail. I think of one guy who was so critical that I wasn’t making a fortune for him—now he’s a sommelier somewhere. There are way too many people in Silicon Valley who have a lottery mentality, and way too many people who won the lottery who shouldn’t have. I hope that they take their good fortune and use it for good.
Wired: Do you think that, in general, there’s a disconnect between the tech world and the rest of the country?
O’Reilly: Oh, absolutely. I think people in Silicon Valley don’t realize what a bubble they’re living in. We saw that bubble get pricked in 2001, and it will get pricked again. Here’s what’s good about that: The people who really are doing things they believe in will keep doing them, and the people who are just gold diggers will go away.
Senior writer Steven Levy (steven_levy@wired.com) profiled Tim O’Reilly in issue 13.10.
