 Tim O'Reilly is going to come on theCUBE, inside theCUBE. Tim O'Reilly, obviously the founder of O'Reilly Media, runs a big business in media, obviously book publishing to event conferences. I've interviewed Tim in the past on a podcast, but never in person on camera. Tim O'Reilly, welcome to theCUBE. All right, thank you. This is my host, co-host Dave Vellante. Dave Vellante from Wikibon, pleasure to meet you. Great. Nice job up there on the keynote. Thank you, join it. We've chatted in the past about the internet operating system. Obviously for you, it must be fun to watch it all play out. I mean, you've been talking about it for years. You've been a real advocate of open source. Obviously you publish a lot of books. Obviously even the Hadoop book, but you're in the community. You're talking through the brightest minds all the time from your food camp to just in general, your interactions with their conferences. So how does it feel that it's emerging? Kind of, maybe in the way that you called it. And two, what's different now and how's it evolving? Well, I have to say, it'd be false modesty to say that it's not really satisfying to see something play out the way you've called it. And it's funny because of course people thought I was a bit of a crackpot, but I think the phone really does make clear that we are building this internet operating system. And I think there's a long way to go before we really have it working. But it is the game. And that's certainly part of what we're looking at with our Web2 Summit. We have this, you know, the theme this year is the points of control. You know, I mean, who's going to own what and how are they going to, you know, what's their strategy going to be relative to each other? And I think that's a real concern. How's it different? I think I always knew that, you know, data was going to be important. And pretty early on when people would say, oh, Web2, what's Web3? I would always say, I think it's when we start having data from sensors, but how rapidly sensor platforms have entered the consumer mainstream I think has surprised me. You know, when I first started talking about this, you know, it was a handful of geeks playing with this stuff. And you know, you look at the iPhone or the Android phone, whatever, the typical smartphone today is a sensor platform. And we're seeing all kinds of other really cool, you know, sensor devices. And you know, I think that's only going to accelerate. And that was one of the points I made in my keynote. You know, I see these doctors in healthcare, for example, thinking, oh my gosh, you know, we're going to have to enter all this data into a patient record. And we go, no, no, no, not really. Patient will walk in, their phone will, you know, announce itself that they're there. You know, when the nurse puts the blood pressure cuff on, it'll report to their patient record automatically. You know, there's actually going to be less record keeping, not more, because I think the devices will do more of the work. You made that point in your keynote, that even when you go back to web 2.0, that one of the fundamental tenants was data, right? Of the companies that rose from the ashes. And then you gave a great example that you were just recently at a healthcare conference where doctors said, well, this drug works 75% of the time. That's right. In fact, you said there's a nuance there. It actually works 100% of the time for 75% of the patients. That's right. And that's a little different way to think about it. Yeah, I mean, that's really what they're starting to learn in personal genomics. You know, there are people who have a gene that, for example, some drug just doesn't get metabolized. And you go, okay, we can identify them. And so we could, A, reduce the cost in the system because we won't bother giving them that drug because we know it doesn't work. You know, and, you know, we're just at the beginning edge of that. But there's a real case where having the data will tell us, oh no, no, you know, use this other drug. It's not as effective, but it's going to be more effective for this patient. Tim, one of the things that you've been covering and obviously advocating for the open source is this innovation and openness. Who controls what? You mentioned it earlier. But you've seen firsthand disruption, okay? And what Hadoop is representing is just another disruptive opportunity to folks like Oracle who are extracting rents out of the market, big telco-like behavior. What do you see for the data world and Hadoop in particular that's disruptive to the marketplace? I mean, it's a lot of big vendors here. We got HP, you have IBM, you got Intel, Green Plum. It looks like people are kind of playing along together, but really at the end of the day it's about disruption because Oracle is a big controlling factor and there's a lot of money at stake. So you've kind of maybe seen this movie before. Have you seen it at this level where there's so much at stake from a dollar standpoint? You know, here's the thing that you have to understand. I don't think it's, well, I mean, Hadoop is disruptive, but everything I've thought about in many ways over the last couple of decades has been inspired by thinking about what happened during the personal computer revolution. You know, in the early days of computing, hardware was king and IBM was more dominant than anybody is today in any other area of computing. And when they introduced the personal computer, they disrupted themselves. I mean, the market was already booming with a lot of little players and they were playing catch-up and they came up with this clever idea that they would build this PC out of commodity parts and they would let anybody build them. And they didn't realize that would destroy the entire world that they dominated over time. And in particular, they didn't understand that when something becomes a commodity, something else adjacent becomes valuable. And so software, which up to that time had not been very valuable, became the source of lock-in. And, you know, IBM didn't understand this so they made a deal with this little company, Microsoft, to provide the operating system. And by the time they realized that the power was in software, it was too late. Now, fast forward to Web 2.0. You know, we saw this same dynamic play out where Microsoft had this stranglehold on the software. We had all kinds of companies competing with them on the basis of software advantage. But what I saw was the open source software and the open protocols of the internet were doing to software what the open architecture of the PC had done to hardware, i.e. they were commoditizing the software layer. So while you describe Oracle as this big bad player, they're a big bad player in the same way that IBM was a big bad player faced with the personal computer. They're dead, they just don't know it yet. And I don't mean dead. I mean, IBM successfully reinvented themselves. But meanwhile, the torch has been passed to companies that are actually amassing not the tools of data, I mean, the tools of data part, but actually data itself. So this is one of the reasons why you see, for example, Google being so incredibly strategic where they're going out there and getting enormous corpus of data that other people go, well, I don't know what the value of that is going to be and they're kind of going, well, we don't know either but we know that data really matters. So we're going to license, and a great example of this is Nuance licensed them some of their speech technology, but Google got to keep the data and then eventually they didn't need the Google, I mean, the Nuance technology anymore, they had all their own data. And Google going out there with street view, photographing every street in every major city. It was like collecting the data, digitizing tens of millions of books, they really understand the power is in the data. And I think, so when you look at, say, Hadoop and Oracle, you have to realize it's commoditizing the very nature of Oracle's business, but there are new forms of lock-in and the new forms of lock-in come from the people who actually have data, not people who have software. So controlling, and the controlling element of that in the old days, Wintel was a controlling monopoly, if you will. We're not seeing that now. I mean, is there, can there be another Wintel? The internet's Wintel. No, no, we're already well down that path. We're already well down that path. There are a lot of data sources that are heavily controlled by single players. And again, it's not yet at the Wintel level, but hey, Wintel wasn't there for 10 or 15 years into the, you know, just think about it. You know, there are, you know, mapping services. There are a couple of players, but not that many. And if you look at how, you know, it started out, you know, there was MapQuest, which later got bought by, you know. Yeah, there was it. Yeah, actually, I'm trying to, I forget who bought whom. But, you know, and now you have Nokia and Microsoft and Google with big assets, right, in that data space. But not, you know, but Google and Microsoft way ahead of everybody else. And Google really, I think, at bottom, way, way ahead. And I think, you know, it's like, can you imagine a smartphone without Google Maps on it? How do developers react to this new, this environment? I mean, developers look to the big players, platform players, whether it's proprietary or open, for signals around how to develop. And they are looking for trust and comfort. Is there anything that you're seeing in the developer ecosystem that's new and different that you can share? Yeah, where's the white space? Oh, well, I mean, oh, there's white space everywhere. But I think probably the biggest, you know, focus right now is on these mobile platforms. You know, and you're really looking at the face off between, you know, the iPhone ecosystem and Android with, you know, Windows 7 being a very dark course at the moment. But maybe it'll turn into something, we'll see. And, you know, there's a whole new set of business models associated with the app ecosystem. You know, it's no longer just advertising. All of a sudden, we have this paid content, paid application ecosystem again. I think that's certainly a very interesting development. I've got a wrap. I'm actually late for... Okay, Tim O'Reilly, inside theCUBE here at SiliconANGLE.tv, on the ground floor of a dupe world. Second year, it's changing, growing. It's a platform that's open and developers are jumping in. And Tim O'Reilly, thanks so much for coming inside theCUBE. O'Reilly Media, very famous book publisher, media company, investor. Congratulations on all your success recently and I look forward to seeing you soon. I know I said I have to go, but I'm going to leave you with one more point. In this app ecosystem, it's easy to forget that data is still up at play. Because what is, in fact, the most important application other than, you know, the sort of functional commodity applications of the phone? You know, being able to call the address book, et cetera. What is the killer app on the iPhone? It's the App Store. That's where you see this dynamic of increasing returns in data. The competition between Apple and Google is partly about the platform, but it's partly about this data layer. Who has more apps? Yeah, who's got the bigger App Store? Yeah, who's got a bigger App Store? Because the one that is bigger is presumably better. And we'll see that data dynamic still play out in that mobile ecosystem as well. Tim O'Reilly, prolific visionaries on the ground, touching a lot of the smart folks in the web. And thanks so much and have a safe trip back to California.