Five years ago I interviewed tech publisher Tim O’Reilly about a new term that his company had just coined: Web 2.0. The first Web 2.0 conference had been held the previous month, October 2004, and O’Reilly had graciously agreed to give an interview to yours truly – "an unknown blogger from New Zealand," as I put it back then. The interview ran in a 3-part series (see also part 2 and part 3) and covered Web 2.0, new business models, social software and eBooks. I’ve always been a big believer in learning from history as we look to the future. So let’s re-visit this interview from five years ago and see how prescient the father of Web 2.0 was. Sponsor Microsoft and Web 2.0 In 2004 the leading Web 2.0 companies were Google, Yahoo! and Amazon. But what of the dominant software company of the previous generation, Microsoft? I asked Tim O’Reilly back in November 2004 whether Microsoft’s core strategy of software lock-in would survive in web 2.0? O’Reilly argued that Microsoft wou…[...]

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5 Years On: ReadWriteWeb’s 2004 Interview With Tim O’Reilly