Last Friday I went and had lunch with a business associate and a coworker. We had Hawiian Plate at a place up in Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood. It was good - but salty.
I asked them if they'd heard the furor of O'Reilly and Web 2.0. They said no. Because there are other O'Reillys that make people routinely more angry, I had to answer the question, "Is this the Fox O'Reilly or the tech book O'Reilly."
I told them it was Tim. Someone people aren't used to being upset with.
I told them what had happened and we all chuckled at the division between business logic and common sense. Heh heh.
So then the weekend passed. The feeding blogging frenzy has settled. And we're all left feeling a little empty. Is it because, As Carr suggests, it wasn't worth fighting for in the first place?
Or is it because now, in the end, we have no recourse and are still living with a lover we'd like to trust again - but have to work at doing so? Tim O'Reilly to the tech world is the guy you trust to pop out those books that save your life. That allow you to be born again into the next wave of innovation.
But O'Reilly hurt us. Not because of SMing Web 2.0 - but because of a breach of trust. His organization's subsequent and rather pathetic defenses show a frightening pattern -- the pattern Microsoft haters attribute to Microsoft, Mac haters attribute to Apple and soon everyone will attribute to Google.
"It's a fairly standard business practice" is another way of saying "my business is more important than the community." The reason that Web 2.0 in particular is so upsetting isn't because we all feel we need more Web 2.0 -- it's because the term itself was already a common term. And, at its core, it meant something pretty much like "control freaks suck."
So, Tim, if I can't trust you not to control something like that, sweetheart, what can I trust you with in the future?
Web 2.0 came into being, was grounded in reality, by the community discussing it. By the many advancing it is a term d'arte (term au derision?) - by working it through the community process. Love it or hate it, it was a shared phantom. At best it was a shared dream. At worst a common hallucination.
Tim O'Reilly's organization gave us, perhaps, the initial abstraction of Web 2.0. The community gave it legs.
After giving it legs, having the term re-appropriated (even if it is "just for conferences") makes it feel like we've all been working for O'Reilly all along. Increasing the value of the Web 2.0 brand. Increasing the valuation of the company.
And that makes a lover feel used.
- Blogged in Ocean Shores, WA
Here's a proposal for how they could have remained true to their stated principals... http://web2dot5.blogspot.com/2006/05/oreilly-get-real.html
Posted by: Liam @ Web 2.5 Blog | 29 May 2006 at 15:55