動物のイラストをPowerBookに刻みたくなる、Tim O'Reillyのビジョン

from MAKE: Blog: Laser etched Powerbook!

Make Blogの、PowerBookにオーライリー本の動物をレーザーで刻印する記事、カッコいい！とか思ってしまうのは、NerdTVで丁度、Tim O'Reillyのインタビューを聞いたあとだったから？

I, Cringely . NerdTV . Archive . Guests | PBS

クオリティーの高い技術書籍を出し続け、テクノロジーを牽引していくビジョナリーの姿は、個人的にはスティーブ・ジョブズと同じぐらい大きな存在です。インタビューももちろん、全部刺激的だけれど、ベンチャーキャピタルに関する部分も面白い。キャピタリストとじっくり話し合った結果、出資を受けない方がいいと、VCの人からアドバイスされたと（笑）。そして、そこから本当にいいVCとの関係が始まったと。

I, Cringely . NerdTV . Transcript | PBS

Tim: Well, I always wanted to keep the company private. I mean first of all we were out in the boonies completely homegrown company. Not very sophisticated. I think I've gotten a little bit more sophisticated over the years. But we weren't in Silicon Valley; we weren't part of Silicon Valley culture. We just didn't know what to do. And I read a book by Bill Davidow one of the founders of Mohr Davidow called Marketing High Technology or something like that. He made a really compelling point, which just stuck in my brain. And it was to dominate the market; you have to be more than half of the market and growing faster than the market as a whole.

I looked at this and I went oh. There is no way we can dominate the Internet because we don't have, we are a small company, we don't have the resources. I don't know how to do it. So that was when we decided to sell. And I could have if I had been more sophisticated; I would have gone and found a VC or whatever. But we met with a bunch of VC's and part of it was they looked at me and I went I was just this idealist. I was like I had all these ideas about wanting to sort of spread knowledge. And I was also; my original business plan for the company was interesting work for interesting people. It wasn't go out there and make a lot of money. And I had this whole idealistic story about why I was in business, what I was doing. And they looked at me and they went, I had this great conversation with Bill Janeway, of Warburg Pincus who took me aside after one of these meetings and said, "You don't want to do this. Don't take our money, you wouldn't like it." And actually Bill's been a friend ever since and he's now actually on my board. But yeah I think it was partly just lack of sophistication. I was kind of ---

あとweb2.0というと、すっかりこの数ヶ月でHype的な使われ方が多くなってしまったけれど（デジタル・ネイティブ = ミームとしてのWeb 2.0と、Hypeとしてのドットコムの違いを知る）、元々のアイデア・Memeとしてのweb2.0にいたるストーリーが、ものすごくシンプルに説明されている。

「文章を書くこと」と「プログラミング」の、両方に長けたTimならではのオリジナリティーから、ものを作ること、シェアすること、コミュニケーションからweb2.0に至るパートは必聴。

こういうインタビューがPodcastingで配信されて、電車の中でiPodで聞ける、ということ自体が、ティム・オライリーとスティーブ・ジョブズのようなビジョナリーが共振し始めている証拠なんでしょうね。

I, Cringely . NerdTV . Transcript | PBS

Bob: Now you have spent now a career dealing with writers and programmers essentially. How are they different characters, personalities?

Tim: You know I think the thing that I would say more than anything else about our customers is that they are creators. You know what I mean? A lot of we've actually launched a magazine recently called Make in the term that we've been introduced as makers, people who make stuff. And there is people who make stuff in the physical world. There is people who make stuff with words. There is people who make stuff with programs. And I really believe that that whole creative culture, people didn't realize how creative programming is. And anybody who's done it of course knows that not only is it creative, but it's incredibly absorbing. Getting it's I know there has been a lot of debate even among programmers about Paul Graham's essay, Hackers and Painters. It certainly matches my experience. That it's a creative act and there is a lot in common with that kind of you have this image of what you are trying to create. And it's like the old story of Michelangelo chipping the image finding the image in the stone. You have this idea of the way you want that program to work and you are just going to chip away until you find it.

And this bug is in the way. I find that creative streak I think often leads in a programmers to be good predictors of where culture as a whole is going to go. And that is where I think I've tried over the years to in some ways use my customers as a filter or a predictor of where technology as a whole is going to go. Or where the world as a whole is going to go. So really the early adopters of the Internet were all scientists and programmers. But they did things that were sort of the native way that you work in that culture. So they shared a certain way, they communicated a certain way. And so I was able to say boy as more people get online, these kinds of behaviors will spread. And the kinds of things that happened when there were a few hundred thousand people online would become very different when there were millions of people online and different kinds of people.

And so I have the talk I give sometimes called Watching the Alfa Geeks which has that premise that you often that people are very comfortable with technology who can kind of bend it to their will. They often will build these incredibly complicated things. And people will say the geeks aren't good. They don't understand the average consumer. And they don't have to. But they can tell you where the technology wants to go.

And so two examples that I use a lot are one was web services. We gave our first talk on web services what is now called web services in 1997 at our very first Perl conference. Because it was obvious to us that this is where the Internet was going. Because all the programmers we knew were treating websites as data sources. They were writing these Perl programs to scrape data from some remote site. We for example, we had all these programs that scraped Amazon for competitive information about our, about other people's books and pricing and all this kind of stuff. Why would we go mouse around on for hours at a time and type it into a spreadsheet? You get a programmer to do that for you.

So the programmers were building all these sort of half ass ways of using these sites in unauthorized ways. And we said wow, this will get easier eventually. People will figure out how to do it right. And sure enough bit-by-bit that has turned out to be the paradigm for how people have started to think about the platform today. And that's the whole focus of the conference that we have now, web 2.0. It was their implicit in our very first conference nine years ago because the hackers were doing it. And we were saying okay, eventually the entrepreneurs are going to come along and say we are going to make this easier for ordinary people. And then it will just become part of the platform. Part of the fabric of how people think.