Tim O'Reilly: at the Leading Edge of the Web

Online publisher surveys the future of information

by Richard Cole

"The Internet is probably the ultimate open system."

Present Position: Founder and president, O'Reilly & Associates

Years in the Industry: 17

Years as an Employee: none

Sales for O'Reilly & Associates in 1994: $16.8 million

Age: 41

Car He Drives: "A beat-up 1990 Toyota pickup"

Place of Birth: Ireland, moving to the U.S. as an infant

Children: two daughters

Latest Book Read: The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett, set in Scotland during the reign of Mary Queen of Scots. ("Among other things, it describes the beginning of business from medieval times. Very interesting.")

Future of Open Systems: "In a way, I see operating systems as mattering less and less. At the same time, the concept of open systems has clearly demonstrated a lot of power. When you look at the shape of computing in the 1990s and select the most interesting pieces of software out there, most have been developed through an open, collaborative process. The Internet itself wasn't developed by any one individual or company but by thousands of people. That's where the future lies--with open platforms that will allow people to build rapidly on the shoulders of others."

"I consider Tim O'Reilly to be a hero of the Internet," says Eric Schmidt, chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems. Most industry leaders would certainly agree.

As president of O'Reilly & Associates, Tim has become a leading publisher of books about Unix, the X Window System and the Internet. When he published Ed Krol's Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, the book became an instant bestseller and remains a classic in the field. Tim's Global Network Navigator, an online guide to the World Wide Web, was recently sold to America Online for $11 million.

Tim has been cited as a model for entrepreneurs who hope to make their name--and fortune--with high technology. As Schmidt says, "Here's a guy who built his own company from scratch with the objective of making it a great place to work and to create a long-term technical publishing brand. He saw the Internet coming, and his books have been as important as Mosaic in establishing the Internet as the future of computing."

You might assume that Tim's path to high-tech publishing began with some sort of technical degree. Actually, he was a classics major at Harvard. This was a natural choice at the time, considering his background. He grew up in a family that stressed reading and a "strong intellectual life." His father, a neurologist, read translations of Homer to the children at night. Tim was also the product of Catholic schooling, studying Latin and Greek for years before he went to Harvard.

Technical Writing

Tim received a bachelor's degree cum laude from Harvard and married at 21. Initially, he wasn't sure of what career direction to take. His new father-in-law, a "born-again businessman," was terrified that he might become an academic.

As he looked around the Boston area for work, he found an opportunity through his wife Susan, who was teaching communication workshops. One of her students, a computer programmer, had taken on a technical writing project. The only problem was that the programmer didn't know how to write. "I thought I was a writer at the time," says Tim, who had just finished a book on the science fiction author Frank Herbert, "so I helped him out." Their collaboration led to a tech writing and consulting company that lasted for five years.

Ironically, his background in the classics came in handy as he trained himself to be a tech writer and editor. As he explains, the study of classical languages requires close reading: picking a sentence apart word by word to understand its grammar and logic. Technical writing can be approached in the same way. "I didn't know much about computers," he says, "so I'd talk to engineers, read the specifications and still couldn't make heads or tails out of it. Then I'd read it again, then again, and slowly see the patterns, and the terms would start to stick. Then I'd read it again and go 'Aha! Now I understand how this fits together!'" Apparently, studying actual Greek was good preparation for wrestling with technical descriptions that "look like Greek" to the uninitiated.

In 1985, Tim, now with his own company, started publishing books. At first a sideline, the publishing projects became so successful that he eventually phased out the original technical writing/consulting side of the business. In 1989, he moved back to California where he had spent much of his childhood.

"Cyberspace Is People"

Tim's position as head of O'Reilly & Associates gives him a unique and far-ranging perspective on the world of information. Although he doesn't quite share the gee-whiz optimism of a Bill Gates in describing the computerized world of tomorrow, he does feel that information technology will eventually help us all. "Cyberspace is people," he says, "and in the future, more people will be empowered to access and manage information."

The proof, he argues, is apparent from the gradual separation of hardware from software and software from information products. In the 1960s and early 1970s, software was inseparable from hardware: applications were developed only for certain boxes. Then, with the development of standardized PC platforms and open systems, software could be written independently of a specific computer.

At the same time, however, information products--the actual user applications--were still inseparable from software; that is, they could only be developed by trained software programmers. Even only five years ago, says Tim, publishers were "wringing their hands," wondering how to enter the Internet and develop online publishing without actually hiring a staff of programmers. Should they become software companies? Contract software companies? No one could envision developing online information products without being able to write software programs.

Today, we are witnessing the next "separation point" as technology is beginning to allow nontechnical users to develop multimedia products without being programmers. According to Tim, the World Wide Web will become, in effect, the next open software platform, one on which "a new generation of information companies will take off."

Java and the Web

Tim is especially interested in technology that helps nontechnical users develop their own information products. That's why he has mixed feelings about innovations such as [Sun Microsystems'] Java, the new Internet technology and development language. "Java is really promising," he says, "but it pushes things back in the direction of programmer space. To the extent that it supports canned components that nontechnical people can use, that's great. But I really want to see software that makes the Internet more of a user environment and less of a programmer environment."

According to Tim, the Internet and the Web are ideally suited to becoming fully developed "user environments." For one thing, they offer tremendous potential as a communications tool. "Once you've gotten on e-mail," he says, "it's hard to live without it."

For another thing, the Web is a "universal information sharing tool." Online publishing will become a fairly large part of this information sharing. Tim points out that the publishing industry as it already exists is very similar to the Web. Each year, over 50,000 titles are published in the United States, many for relatively small audiences. In the same way, the Web offers thousands of sites that are also highly focused in content.

"I can put up an agenda for fifty people, or I can create the Global Network Navigator which is getting 20 million hits a week," says Tim. "There's a wide range, and that what makes the Web most interesting."

Information Interfaces

Tim doesn't see the value of information technology as simply making more information accessible to more people. "Information is useless, for the most part," he says. "What's going to happen is that people are going to find the right level and right place for information." This process will be aided by, among other things, new products that serve as information interfaces.

A simple example of these interfaces is a hardcopy magazine which serves as a user interface to the news. A more sophisticated example might be the creation of online publications that allow users to access additional information by clicking on specific words or graphics.

Tim cites Encarta, Microsoft's general-purpose encyclopedia, as embodying current ideas about online multimedia "books." Users can scroll through various articles watching pictures and listening to sounds. However, Tim points out that Encarta is inherently limited in the content it can deliver: "You can read about tigers, but you'll never click on a real tiger." In contrast, Microsoft's Cinemania product represents the next step in information interfaces. "It's fundamentally a digital world: you read the description of movies. Then you can actually download the movie. The book becomes not an end in itself but an interface to some larger body of information."

Tim suggests that a Cinemania-style product could be adapted in the future to a video-on-demand service offered by a cable company. Users could read reviews, do sophisticated searching ("all the movies that Roger Ebert liked starring John Wayne that aren't westerns") get a short list, watch film clips, and then download the film they want. In this way, a product like Cinemania could serve as an interface to even larger information spaces. Developing these kinds of rich "information spaces" will be one of the main goals of O'Reilly & Associates in the immediate future.

When talking about the future, Tim tries to be open-minded and not locked into rigid agendas. He says that because he's never worked for another company as an employee, he has had to "make it up" as he went along. Naturally, he has a set of management and business goals, but at the same time he also simply tries to "turn people loose" to do their best work. Essentially, he trusts that events will unfold as they should. "I think that a lot of times, people try to impose their will on the world. If you stay alert and open, you'll find the right directions that take you to interesting places." He adds, "I didn't set out to do any of the things I've managed to accomplish. I just tried to respond to what came."