Wired has an interesting piece on O’Reilly mogul, Tim O’Reilly:
Tim O’Reilly likes to walk in the dark. Sometimes after dinner he’ll head down the long dirt pathway outside his rambling farmhouse in Sebastopol, California, a post-hippie enclave between wine country and the Pacific Ocean. No flashlight. And on this particular overcast night, with rain dropping from a mossy sky, it’s tough to see a thing. But O’Reilly’s pace is brisk and optimistic, his feet crunching the dirt as the wiry 51-year-old hurtles himself forward.
As always, he’s relying on his radar for safe passage. O’Reilly’s radar is legendary. It works on country roads and on the information sea. It told him there was a market for consumer-friendly computer manuals and that he could build a great business publishing them. It helped him understand the significance of the World Wide Web before there were browsers to surf it. And it led him to identify and proselytize technologies like peer-to-peer, syndication, and Wi-Fi before most people had even heard of them at all. As a result, “Tim O’Reilly’s radar” is kind of a catchphrase in the industry.
Yet O’Reilly himself has operated for years under the radar. Most nontechies, if they know him at all, know him by the eponymous name of his publishing -company. It has a 15 percent share of the $400 million -computer-book market but casts a much bigger shadow. O’Reilly books tend to colonize entire sections at Borders and Barnes & Noble, their distinctive cover design as recognizable as the Tide circle on a box of detergent or the Apple logo on the lid of a PowerBook. In serif type over a glossy white background, there is the title, often- naming a computer language or protocol familiar to codeheads and gibberish to everyone else (JavaServer Faces; Essential CVS; Using Samba, 2nd Edition). The illustrations are realistically rendered pen-and-ink drawings of animals.
A good piece on the man who started the company that has produced so many bibles for us computer geeks.
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