Tim O'Reilly to software developers: Get serious

Computer-book publishing magnate Tim O'Reilly is urging young geeks to stop making software that lets you throw sheep at your friends on Facebook or drink beer on your iPhone and to instead start making a difference in the world. He is daring them, in the words of James Collins and Jerry Porras, authors of the business classic "Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies," to take on "big, hairy, audacious goals."

That is the theme of next month's Web 2.0 Summit: "Web Meets World." And that has been the theme of O'Reilly's addresses to the Web 2.0 faithful. (You can watch video of his keynotes in San Francisco this spring and in New York City last month.)

As we write in this story in today's L.A. Times:

He says it's not just the right thing to do, but also the smart thing to do -- especially as the credit crunch spreads to Silicon Valley, venture financing becomes scarce and start-ups have to retrench.

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O'Reilly argues that Silicon Valley has strayed from the passion and idealism that fuel innovation to instead follow what he calls the "mad pursuit of the buck with stupider and stupider ideas."

Flush with money and opportunity following the post-dot-com resurgence, he says, some entrepreneurs have cocooned in a "reality bubble," insulated from poverty, disease, global warming and other problems that are gripping the planet. He argues that they should follow the model of some of the world's most successful technology companies, including Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which sprang from their founders' efforts to "work on stuff that matters."

That might sound like empty rhetoric coming from some. But when O'Reilly talks, the tech world tends to listen.

After all, this is the guy who understood the power and significance of the Internet before most people knew it existed. O'Reilly helped coin the term "Web 2.0" to refer to the next phase of the Internet built on bottom-up sharing and collective action. He's the consummate matchmaker, bringing together great minds to work on great projects. He's a successful blogger, entrepreneur (he sold a business to AOL for $11 million mostly in stock and options back in the day) and investor (he was an early investor in Blogger, which earned him pre-IPO Google shares when the search giant bought the start-up). And he runs an influential book publishing empire in Sebastopol, Calif., called O'Reilly Media, which has snared a significant share of the computer book market.

But he is perhaps best known in Silicon Valley for putting on packed conferences headlined by some of the tech industry's brightest. Now he is using those conferences as a bully pulpit.

"There are big problems to be solved," he told the audience in New York last month. And then he listed the problems: The financial meltdown. Global warming. Declining U.S. competitiveness. The spread of infectious diseases. The widening income gap and soaring health care costs. The dysfunctional political system. "These are pretty depressing times," he said.

Some forward-thinking philanthropists and entrepreneurs, corporations and nonprofits have already turned to the Internet and other modern-day technologies to tackle these growing problems, O'Reilly said. Now it's time for others to step up and accept his 21st century version of 17th century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal's wager: "Assume the worst, that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, unless we do something about it," he said. Even if the planet isn't getting warmer, the innovation to cool it down will help make it a safer, happier place for all, he argued.

O'Reilly says he was spurred to action by his son-in-law, Saul Griffith, president and chief scientist at wind-energy company Makani Power, which is funded by Google. He and Griffith are considering holding hearings on global warming to pressure Congress to hold its own.

"Saul could have done anything," O'Reilly said. "He has more ideas than you could shake a stick at. But for him it's not about where he can make the most money. It's about where he can make the most difference."

-- Jessica Guynn

Photo: Tim O'Reilly. Credit: Brian Solis via Flickr

Comments

[Ted Rheingold]

I have a lot of respect for Tim O'Reilly, but the Web2 conferences to date have been focused on everything BUT actually generating revenue. If the above message was pushed harder the last two years their may be a lot more companies financially prepared for an economic downturn...

[David H Dennis]

You know, global warming would actually benefit most people in the USA. The overwhelming majority of the United States has a chilly climate that becomes cold and gloomy during the "winter".

Eliminating "winter" would provide enormous benefits to all. People would be able to spend more time comfortably outside, which would make them walk and exercise more. Furthermore, there would be less need to heat homes, a massive energy sink.

The well known "seasonal affective disorder" would be substantially reduced, if not eliminated, with the elimination of "winter" and its cold and depressing climate.

It is a fact that about five times more people die due to cold in winter than die due to heat in summer, and the number of deaths due to tropical natural disasters is a tiny fraction of those who die due to cold every year.

It is true that many species depend on cold, and they would die out or at least become more rare. However, about ten times as many species thrive in warm climates. Beautiful tropical plants would come in to replace the drab vegetation of "winter". If we want the maximum species diversity, making more of our planet warm and pleasant would be a good thing, not a bad one.

Eliminate winter gloom! Accelerate global warming!

I would like to make this serious point: Nobody talks about the advantages of global warming. I only see people talk about the bad things, not the good. And yet as I have described, there are substantial, positive advantages to allowing warming to occur.

Not that we have much choice. We are not going to be able to prevent global warming, because the forces leading to it are far greater than our energy use -- which indicates to me that our energy use is highly unlikely to be the sole, or even the main, cause.

But why we would want to prevent a change that would appear beneficial to most of us is something that still puzzles me.

D

[Roger Harris]

Mr. Rheingold,

I and many others hate hot weather and do not find it's vegetation all that pretty. What you see as drab winter many see as bleak beauty. This is similar for many people's love of deserts. If all animal and plant life are tropical we lose the diversity needed to make life on earth flexible and strong.

I like Cod, Lobster, Elk, northern berries and many things coming from colder climates. People from northern climates are industrious by necessity, as one must work a little harder to live in colder climates. Keep global warming down south.

[Martin Hill]

@Ted Rheingold
That is a very simplistic view you are putting forward.

You might think you would enjoy warmer weather but do you realise that it would also most likely come with increasing humidity (do you want that? yuk!) and massive disruptions in weather patterns so some places would actually get colder, others would get more rain, others would get drought etc.

Then of course there are the massive problems of desertification, crop failures, lack of water, rising sea levels, massive extinctions, increased intensity and frequency of hurricanes, etc etc.

The other issue is that though the planet Earth has seen ice ages and warmer periods in relatively recent geological times, the Earth *hasn't* seen the huge and increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that we are seeing now meaning we could hit a tipping point where change suddenly accelerates and the Earth ends up uninhabitable.

Frankly I am shaking in my boots at the possible futures we are blindly racing towards.

-Mart

[Joe Blow]

@Martin & @ Roger...

Your comments should actually be directed to David and NOT Ted Rheingold because the author's name appears at the end of the comment NOT the beginning..

Global "critical doltism" is a bigger problem than global warming to be sure.

Boggles the mind....