Top 72 Tim O'Reilly Quotes
#2. I personally own six or seven thousand books, so I - and I certainly don't want to see them go away.
Tim O'Reilly
#3. The future is always scary to those who cling to the past.
Tim O'Reilly
#4. So many technologies start out with a burst of idealism, democratization, and opportunity, and over time, they close down and become less friendly to entrepreneurship, to innovation, to new ideas. Over time, the companies that become dominant take more out of the ecosystem than they put back in.
Tim O'Reilly
#5. My original business model - I actually wrote this down - was 'interesting work for interesting people.'
Tim O'Reilly
#7. Obscurity is a bigger problem for authors than piracy.
Tim O'Reilly
#8. What new technology does is create new opportunities to do a job that customers want done.
Tim O'Reilly
#9. There are more than 21 eBook channels already. Authors can't possibly get to these and do what they do best.
Tim O'Reilly
#10. Share what you do profusely, because it will be remixed by others into something new, rich and strange.
Tim O'Reilly
#12. While the willingness of the ancient Greeks to sacrifice their lives for glory brings tears to my eyes, I cannot ultimately condone the choice of Achilles.
Tim O'Reilly
#13. I have to say there are a lot of me-too products and companies. Yet another social network, of the 15th flavor - that's common in every new technology revolution. There are imitators who have marginal improvements.
Tim O'Reilly
#14. We don't market products narrowly. We market big stories about the industry, things that matter to a lot of people.
Tim O'Reilly
#15. Just as the PC bled back into industrial economy, I think the Internet is going to bleed back into our overall economy and have a transformative effect on major sectors that we don't yet foresee.
Tim O'Reilly
#16. It's hard to make something as large as a government change. It's a little bit like building the transcontinental railroad.
Tim O'Reilly
#17. At O'Reilly, the way we think about our business is that we're not a publisher; we're not a conference producer; we're a company that helps change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.
Tim O'Reilly
#18. No matter your sector, chances are that people are already twittering about your products, your brand, your company or at least your industry.
Tim O'Reilly
#19. Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming.
Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months
to develop can be produced in a matter of days.
Tim O'Reilly
#20. The problem for most artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity.
Tim O'Reilly
#21. Proprietary software grew up, starting really in the 1980s, as an alternative and that became the dominant model with the rise of companies like Microsoft and Oracle and the like.
Tim O'Reilly
#22. An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.
Tim O'Reilly
#23. Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.
Tim O'Reilly
#24. The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration.
Tim O'Reilly
#25. Early on, when software was developed by computer scientists, just people working with computers, people passed around software because that was how you got computers to do things.
Tim O'Reilly
#26. A key function of a publishing brand is the bestowal of status by who and what you pay attention to.
Tim O'Reilly
#27. A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books.
Tim O'Reilly
#28. I think that companies always become complacent, over time. Or most companies, that is.
Tim O'Reilly
#29. One of O'Reilly's advantages is that we have a network of thousands of user groups to whom we give free books, to whom we advertise our products, and they spread the word. If you don't have that database, it's hard to get the attention of the market.
Tim O'Reilly
#30. People don't care about books. They care about ideas.
Tim O'Reilly
#31. Being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong.
Tim O'Reilly
#32. If you are extremely well known and have a very desirable product, then yes, you probably do suffer a bit from piracy, in the same way that if you make a lot of money, you pay more in taxes than if you don't make any money.
Tim O'Reilly
#33. I think Microsoft will have to change. I think that the business of Microsoft, the company of Microsoft, is going to continue to succeed. But I think the business model of Microsoft is going to have to change.
Tim O'Reilly
#34. I believe that the human motive to share is very powerful. The human motive to profit is also very powerful, and I think that the profit motive and the sharing motive are not exclusive.
Tim O'Reilly
#35. Virtually every real breakthrough in technology had a bubble which burst, left a lot of people broke who'd invested in it, but also left the infrastructure for this next golden age, effectively.
Tim O'Reilly
#36. In social networks, you gain and bestow status through those you associate with.
Tim O'Reilly
#37. A lot of my energy is going to Code for America, Jen Pahlka's non-profit startup. We're doing a lot of great work teaching government how to apply technology and changing the culture of government.
Tim O'Reilly
#38. There is people who make stuff with words. There is people who make stuff with programs. And I really believe that that whole creative culture, people didn't realize how creative programming is. And anybody who's done it of course knows that not only is it creative, but it's incredibly absorbing.
Tim O'Reilly
#39. It's a great discipline to have to report to somebody, even if you're the sole owner
Tim O'Reilly
#40. A short, glorious life in service of a greater good - say, the life of the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the pilots in the Battle of Britain, of whom Winston Churchill said 'Never have so many owed so much to so few,' - that is worth praising. But for glory alone? I think not.
Tim O'Reilly
#41. I see publishers bemoaning their fate and saying that this is the end of publishing. No! Publishers will recreate themselves. Some of that comes from my experience as a print publisher.
Tim O'Reilly
#42. Anyone who puts a small gloss on a fundamental technology, calls it proprietary, and then tries to keep others from building on it, is a thief.
Tim O'Reilly
#44. Who was the first person to fly across the Atlantic? Lindbergh. Who was the second? No idea.
Tim O'Reilly
#45. Amazon is now the definitive source for data about whole sets of products - fungible consumer products. EBay is the authoritative source for the secondary market of those products. Google is the authority for information about facts, but they're relatively undifferentiated.
Tim O'Reilly
#46. Just do something that lights you up, and lights up your customers, and lights up the world and scale to that.
Tim O'Reilly
#47. We were the first people to do advertising on the Web. I actually saw in 1993 that the ad could be the content, the destination.
Tim O'Reilly
#48. I believe people are fundamentally good and want to find things that make life better for themselves. There are social dynamics for people that work, and there are ones that are pathological. But beneath every 'no' lays a 'yes' that had never been broken. I put my life-faith in that.
Tim O'Reilly
#49. Everybody's enamored of the iPhone, the Google phone. But the applications are going to change. You know, we're going to start using our phones for shopping. It's going to change the nature of advertising.
Tim O'Reilly
#50. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn't be about the money.
Tim O'Reilly
#51. There's not a single business model, and there's not a single type of electronic content. There are really a lot of opportunities and a lot of options and we just have to discover all of them.
Tim O'Reilly
#52. When you have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for them, it clears out an awful lot of woolly thinking.
Tim O'Reilly
#53. Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Tim O'Reilly
#54. We often get blinded by the forms in which content is produced, rather than the job that the content does.
Tim O'Reilly
#56. Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.
Tim O'Reilly
#57. Collective intelligence. Think of how Wikipedia works, how Amazon harnesses user annotation on its site, the way photo-sharing sites like Flickr are bleeding out into other applications ... We're entering an era in which software learns from its users and all of the users are connected.
Tim O'Reilly
#58. The biggest mistake we see companies make when they first hit Twitter is to think about it as a channel to push out information.
Tim O'Reilly
#59. I like to think that even if we make some really bad choices and go down some bad paths, we'll eventually emerge from it.
Tim O'Reilly
#60. There is a possibility of fresh talent coming to work for the government. Millennials are the most public-spirited generation since the 1960s. There is an opportunity to harness that generation and make government service cool again.
Tim O'Reilly
#61. I've been deeply influenced by Aristotle's idea that virtue is a habit, something you practice and get better at, rather than something that comes naturally. 'The control of the appetites by right reason,' is how he defined it.
Tim O'Reilly
#62. Empowerment of individuals is a key part of what makes open source work, since in the end, innovations tend to come from small groups, not from large, structured efforts.
Tim O'Reilly
#63. A lot of the websites built through the 1990s used Perl. The first webmaster of Sun Microsystems coined a wonderful phrase. He said Perl is the duck tape of the Internet - it's this language that people would write all these scripts that make things just work.
Tim O'Reilly
#64. I wanted more control of my life. I wanted work to fit in, not to dominate; to support, not to lead the pattern of my life.
Tim O'Reilly
#65. I think that Microsoft will increasingly feel margin pressure from Linux as well as people saying: well actually the applications that really matter to me are not on my PC. And so they're going to be able to extract less of a monopoly rent, so to speak.
Tim O'Reilly
#66. We're entering a new world in which data may be more important than software.
Tim O'Reilly
#67. Apple is in a position they've been in a lot of times before. They're like Moses showing the way to the promised land, but they don't actually go there.
Tim O'Reilly
#68. If companies don't think systemically enough - if they try to capture too much of the value - eventually, innovation moves somewhere else.
Tim O'Reilly
#69. I came up with the idea that I wanted to develop products because I saw services businesses being a dead end long term.
Tim O'Reilly
#70. Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don't want to run out of gas on your trip, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations.
Tim O'Reilly
#71. I'd love to have the time to learn to sing opera properly rather than bellowing half-formed fragments of melody in exuberant moments.
Tim O'Reilly
#72. This whole idea of visibility by the public creates a pretty powerful lever. In the new transparency era, you are able to make change you would otherwise have difficulty making. It's no longer possible for somebody just to bury the problem. It's the reason why things like WikiLeaks are important.
Tim O'Reilly
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