Tim O'Reilly: Steve Jobs Is Trying To Build A Fundamental Challenge To The Web
This morning during his keynote talk at Web 2.0 Expo, Tim O'Reilly took a look at the State of the Internet Operating System — a term he uses to describe the intertwined web services like search, the social graph …
Context & Ripple Effects
O'Reilly has been building this frame for years: he course-corrected the definition of Web 2.0 back in 2008 to emphasize collective intelligence and data over buzzwords, argued government should be rebuilt as a platform in his 2009 Gov 2.0 work, and published his full State of the Internet Operating System essay on Radar this past March — the thesis that search, social graphs and payment rails are becoming the real OS layer of the net. The Web 2.0 Expo keynote is where he turns that framework on Apple.
The timing is pointed: Jobs published his 'Thoughts on Flash' letter in late April, publicly defended rejecting apps including a Pulitzer winner's earlier that month, and was reportedly among the most vocal critics of one iPad app and shunning it — an unconfirmed claim, but part of a spring of very public Apple-versus-the-open-web friction.
First-order effects
- O'Reilly's keynote reframes Apple not as a web company but as a rival to the web itself, forcing developers and publishers weighing native iPad apps against browser delivery to see that choice as ideological, not just technical.
- Jobs's confirmed 'Thoughts on Flash' position and the high-profile app rejections now get read through O'Reilly's lens as gatekeeping of the distribution layer rather than isolated product decisions.
Second-order effects
- Adobe and other toolmakers whose runtimes are excluded from Apple's devices are pushed toward HTML5 and non-iOS platforms as the viable route to reach users outside the App Store's terms.
- Rivals building competing mobile platforms gain a rhetorical weapon: they can position themselves as the open alternative to Apple's closed stack, making openness a selling point rather than an engineering detail.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, control of the 'Internet Operating System' — the service layers O'Reilly maps — shifts from open web standards toward whoever owns the device and storefront, raising structural questions about whether regulators or market forces police that gatekeeper power.
- O'Reilly's own arc, from naming Web 2.0 to mapping its successor, signals that the industry's center of gravity is moving from websites to platform ecosystems, with conference-stage framings like this one shaping how investors and builders allocate for the next cycle.
The trend: Computing is consolidating around closed device-and-storefront ecosystems that compete directly with the open web's service layers, with Apple under Jobs as the most aggressive test case.