Tim O'Reilly's Commencement Speech At UC Berkeley SIMS

GeorgeAppiah.com Presents: Greatest Speeches In History - Commencement Speeches

Tim O’Reilly
Publisher, Entrepreneur, Founder of O’Reilly Media, Inc

This great commencement address was given by Tim O'Reilly in
2006 at the UC Berkeley School of Information (often called SIMS,
for its old name, the School of Information Management and
Systems).

Thank you very much for having me here to speak to you. I know that this is
an important day in your lives, and I’m honored to be the one chosen to give
you advice as you begin the next stage of your careers. I hope that you will
find that advice useful.

I hope also that I am able to make my comments meaningful to those who helped
get you here -- the spouses, parents, grandparents, and other family members
who are so proud of you today. We work in a profession that can be mysterious
to the layman, with a private language that sets us apart like one of the secret
societies depicted in The Da Vinci Code! I still remember my first exposure to
the computer industry as a humanities graduate. I was an experienced writer,
but knew nothing about technology. I'd agreed to help a friend of mine, a
programmer, to land a contract job writing a manual. We interviewed two
engineers about their project while I took increasingly desperate notes. It was as
if they were speaking a foreign language! As we walked away, I turned to my
friend and asked quot;Were they just pulling my leg?quot; It was hard to believe that this
jargon-filled dialog was actually meaningful. It was an inauspicious start to my
career.

+233-24-188-5761 • george@georgeappiah.com • www.georgeappiah.com


There are three lessons that I took away from that moment. The first was to be
fearless in what you attempt. The job I eventually mastered was an enormous
stretch for me. The second lesson was that a difficulty is often an opportunity in
disguise. I built my company by bridging the information gap that I first
encountered that day. The third lesson was the importance of serendipity in your
life choices. I never imagined that I'd build a career as a technical writer,
publisher, and entrepreneur. My training was in Greek and Latin Classics!
Agreeing to help out my friend proved to be a turning point in my life.

In my remarks today, I hope to elaborate on this idea of turning points. Not only
are you at a turning point in your lives, we are at a turning point in the
technology industry, and perhaps even in the history of the world. Most of you
probably know that I've been evangelizing an idea that I call Web 2.0, the idea
that the internet is on the verge of replacing the personal computer as the
dominant computing platform.

And as you know, platform shifts are times of enormous disruption and
enormous opportunity.

New companies succeed because they envision the world anew, not as a logical
continuation of what went before. Microsoft became the dominant company of
the personal computer age with an aggressive vision of computers in every
household, while industry titans of the previous era derided the personal
computer as a toy, and wondered why anyone would need one.

The same is true today. Our expectations and our familiarity with what has gone
before blind us to what is coming.



So let’s step back for a moment, and ask ourselves what is different about the
computing world we are now entering.

The internet as platform. What does that mean?

Let me make it concrete by asking those of you in the audience how many of you
use the Linux operating system. Now how many of you use Google?

Did you realize that Google is built on top of Linux? Did you even need to know
what operating system Google’s computers are running?

That's the internet paradigm shift. The quot;computerquot; is no longer the device that
you have on your desk. It's the seamless integration -- well, maybe there are still
a few seams showing! -- the seamless integration of local computing devices (not
just PCs but also handheld devices, all the way down to the phones that I hope
you turned off during this ceremony) with vast server farms out on the net.

Some observers claim that Google is now running on as many as a million Linux
servers. At the very least, it is running on hundreds of thousands. When you
consider that the application Google delivers is instant access to documents and
services available from, by last count, more than 81 million independent web
servers, we’re starting to understand how true it is, as Sun Microsystems co-
founder John Gage famously said back in 1984, that “the network is the
computer.” It took over 20 years for the rest of the industry to realize that
vision, but we’re finally there.

Internet pundit Clay Shirky memorably summarized the shift to network
computing with a story about Thomas Watson Jr., the head of IBM during the
birth of the mainframe. Watson famously remarked that he saw no need for more
than 5 computers worldwide. Clay noted, “We now know that Thomas Watson



was wrong.” We all laughed as we thought of the hundreds of millions of
personal computers sold today. But then Clay socked us with the punch line:
“He overstated the number by four.”

The internet as platform is the sum of all connected computers and devices.
True internet applications can be thought of as “software above the level of a
single device,” applications that run not on any individual computer but on the
network that connects them. Ultimately, the network ties together all those
devices into a single vast computer.

The applications that succeed on that new computer platform are those that
understand deeply what it means to be network applications. It’s as simple as
this: the secret of success in the networked era is to create or leverage network
effects. It sounds tautological, but in that tautology is a great deal of wisdom.

When we first began thinking about Web 2.0, we asked ourselves what
distinguished the companies that survived the dotcom bust from those that
failed. And we came up with the surprising observation that in one way or
another, each of them was good at harnessing user contributions, applying some
of the same insights to consumer applications that leading edge software
developers have applied to open source software projects like Linux.

Consider Google: their breakthrough in search, the famous PageRank
algorithm, was the result of realizing that you could get better search results by
studying the links that people make to documents, rather than just studying the
content of the documents themselves. Every time one web site makes a link to
another, that's a contribution to Google, one small step in making the search
engine smarter.



Consider EBay: it’s a marketplace of buyers and sellers, with eBay simply acting
as an intermediary. More than 800,000 people now make a living full or part
time via eBay, and millions buy goods from each other in the world’s largest
swap meet. Pierre Omidyar, the founder, likes to point out that it’s fundamental
to eBay’s succes that has a positive social effect, not only creating new economic
opportunities for individuals, but helping teach complete strangers to trust one
another.

How about Amazon? They have the same product data as all of their
competitors, but their tireless effort to get the users to annotate that data -- more
than ten million user reviews, and countless other forms of user generated
content -- have made them the most authoritative product catalog in the world.

Or consider recent successes like Flickr, the photo sharing service recently
acquired by Yahoo! They became the fastest growing photo service because they
harnessed the power of sharing. While previous internet photo sharing services
focused on sharing photos with friends and family, Flickr made the default
behavior to share with the world.

YouTube, the video sharing site, and MySpace, the social networking site, have
similar dynamics. The users not only provide the content, they provide the
marketing. These sites have become hugely popular without spending a nickel
on advertising, because they rely on word of mouth.

Now consider the alternative -- dot-bombs like the infamous pets.com. They
treated the customer as a dumb consumer, and the web merely as a broadcast
medium, with millions of dollars of Superbowl advertising substituting for
customer enthusiasm.



But even more important than their enthusiasm, the users of successful internet
applications supply their intelligence. A true Web 2.0 application is one that
gets better the more people use it. Google gets smarter every time someone
makes a link on the web. Google gets smarter every time someone makes a
search. It gets smarter every time someone clicks on an ad. And it immediately
acts on that information to improve the experience for everyone else.

It’s for this reason that I argue that the real heart of Web 2.0 is harnessing
collective intelligence.

And it’s for that same reason that I argue that Web 2.0 represents not just a
turning point for the computer industry but for the world as a whole.

The internet represents one of the key factors in what Thomas Friedman calls
the flattening of the world. By creating universal access to knowledge, by
providing opportunities for remote collaboration and commerce, the internet is
accelerating the evolution of the global economy and global culture.

While it may seem far fetched, you can begin to see signs of what the flower
children of the sixties called “global consciousness.” We just didn’t realize that
it was going to be mediated by technology!

Let me give you a couple of concrete examples.

First, we’ve all read the scare stories about bird flu, and how once it crosses over
into humans, we could be facing a global pandemic. The key to controlling the
spread of such a disease will be early detection and isolation of cases. And it
turns out that governments are very bad at reporting this information. However,
a Canadian project called GPHIN, the Global Public Health Intelligence
Network, has played an amazing role in building an internet-based early warning



system -- kind of a Google for disease outbreaks -- that monitors news wires,
web sites, and other sources of user-generated news to identify the possibility of
disease outbreaks. Larry Brilliant, the new head of Google.org, the non-profit
arm of Google, who earlier in his career was deeply involved in the eradication of
smallpox, is now working to expand on this effort, to build a system called
INSTEDD, the International Networked System for Total Early Disease
Detection. Bottom up. Networked. Cooperative.

That's an example of how collective intelligence can be used to build much more
than just a nifty consumer application! The world of Web 2.0 *can* be one in
which we share our knowledge and insights, filter the news for each other, find
out obscure facts, and make each other smarter and more responsive. We can
instrument the world so it becomes something like a giant, responsive organism.
Extrapolate out along the trend line of Web 2.0 and add in automated data
collection from your phone, your GPS, from RFID and embedded sensors, and
imagine the information applications that will be built on that database!

Second, consider what online journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor calls “We the
Media.” In the old days, a small group of publications decided what was news,
and what was not. Not any more. We saw a great example of this just a few weeks
ago. Comic Steven Colbert of the Comedy Channel hit show The Colbert
Report was the invited speaker at the White House Press Corps dinner. He was
expected to roast the president and the White House press corps, but
apparently, the heat was higher than expected. There was little or no mention of
his speech in the mainstream press coverage of the event. But by the middle of
the following week, after the video of Colbert’s speech had been viewed more
than 20 million times on YouTube, and was the talk of the blogosphere,
mainstream media picked up the story.



Blogs and user generated media don’t always get it right, but they show how in
the new world of the internet, knowledge rushes through new channels, and the
network of ordinary users sharing their interests shapes the news.

But there are dark sides to the internet and Web 2.0. Email can be used to
connect people, but it is now burdened with spam. Web sites offer
unprecedented access to information, but they can also provide criminals with
new opportunities to prey on unsuspecting users, via scams, phishing, and other
tricks. Viral marketing can be used to spread rumors as well as truth. The
wisdom of crowds can too easily become the madness of crowds.

But when I think about the dark side of Web 2.0, I am less concerned with
criminal activity or even collective stupidity -- after all, those exist with or
without the internet, and as science fiction writer Cory Doctorow once
remarked, “every complex ecosystem has its parasites.” Instead, I think about
some of the contradictions that are intrinsic to the internet as platform.

Let me outline a few of these issues.

First, privacy. Collective intelligence requires the storage of enormous amounts
of data. And while this data can be used to deliver innovative applications, it can
also be used to invade our privacy. The recent news disclosures about phone
records being turned over to the NSA is one example. Yahoo’s recent disclosure
of the identity of a Chinese dissident to Chinese authorities is another.

The internet has enormous power to increase our freedom. It also has enormous
power to limit our freedom, to track our every move and monitor our every
conversation. We must make sure that we don’t trade off freedom for
convenience or security. Dave Farber, one of the fathers of the Internet, is fond



of repeating the words of Ben Franklin: “Those who give up essential liberty to
purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither, and will lose both.”

Second, concentration of power. While it’s easy to see the user empowerment
and democratization implicit in web 2.0, it’s also easy to overlook the enormous
power that is being accrued by those who’ve successfully become the repository
for our collective intelligence. Who owns that data? Is it ours, or does it belong
to the vendor?

If history is any guide, the democratization promised by Web 2.0 will eventually
be succeeded by new monopolies, just as the democratization promised by the
personal computer led to an industry dominated by only a few companies. Those
companies will have enormous power over our lives -- and may use it for good or
ill. Already we’re seeing companies claiming that Google has the ability to make
or break their business by how it adjusts its search rankings. That's just a small
taste of what is to come as new power brokers rule the information pathways that
will shape our future world.

As a result, I urge you to think hard about the consequences of new technology.
Don't just take for granted that technology will bring us a better world. We must
engage strenuously with the future, thinking through the dark side of each
opportunity, and working to maximize the good that we create while minimizing
the harm.

Third, greed. Web 2.0 has ignited a new feeding frenzy among venture
capitalists and entrepreneurs. It's perhaps too early to call it a bubble, but once
again, enormous fortunes are being created by people with little more than a
bright idea and an instinct for how to harness the power of new technology. You
are among those who have a place at the starting gate of the new race for wealth.



And I want to take this opportunity to caution you.

Some of you may end up working at highflying companies. Some of you may
succeed, and some of you may fail. I want to remind you that financial success is
not the only goal or the only measure of success. It's easy to get caught up in the
heady buzz of making money. You should regard money as fuel for what you
really want to do, not as a goal in and of itself. Money is like gas in the car -- you
need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road -- but a well-lived
life is not a tour of gas stations!

Whatever you do, think about what you really value. If you're an entrepreneur,
the time you spend thinking about your values will help you build a better
company. If you’re going to work for someone else, the time you spend
understanding your values will help you find the right kind of company or
institution to work for, and when you find it, to do a better job.

Don't be afraid to think big. Business author Jim Collins says that great
companies have “big hairy audacious goals.” Google’s motto, “access to all the
world’s information” is an example of such a goal. I like to think that my own
company’s mission, “changing the world by sharing the knowledge of
innovators,” is also such a goal.

Don’t be afraid to fail. There’s a wonderful poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that
talks about the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with an angel, being defeated,
but coming away stronger from the fight. It ends with an exhortation that goes
something like this: “What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes
us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater
things.”



Don’t be afraid, in the end, to live whatever life you choose to the fullest, with
the measure of your success being that you leave the world a slightly better place
for your passage through it.

Thank you very much.

A NOTE FROM GEORGE APPIAH:

Thank you for reading Tim O’Reilly’s inspiring
commencement speech. If you enjoyed this speech,
please visit www.GeorgeAppiah.com for more great and
inspiring speeches, practical guides, free tools, and a
whole lot more. Come on now, I’m waiting for you.


Tim O'Reilly's Commencement Speech At UC Berkeley SIMS

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Tim O'Reilly's Commencement Speech At UC Berkeley SIMS