Top 100 Tim O'reilly Quotes
#1. We don't have a single big advantage," he once told an old adversary, publisher Tim O'Reilly, back when they were arguing over Amazon protecting its patented 1-Click ordering method from rivals like Barnes & Noble. "So we have to weave a rope of many small advantages.
Brad Stone
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Just do something that lights you up, and lights up your customers, and lights up the world and scale to that.
Tim O'Reilly
#6. 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
#7. Who was the first person to fly across the Atlantic? Lindbergh. Who was the second? No idea.
Tim O'Reilly
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. It's a great discipline to have to report to somebody, even if you're the sole owner
Tim O'Reilly
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. In social networks, you gain and bestow status through those you associate with.
Tim O'Reilly
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong.
Tim O'Reilly
#21. People don't care about books. They care about ideas.
Tim O'Reilly
#22. 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
#23. I think that companies always become complacent, over time. Or most companies, that is.
Tim O'Reilly
#24. A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books.
Tim O'Reilly
#25. A key function of a publishing brand is the bestowal of status by who and what you pay attention to.
Tim O'Reilly
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. We're entering a new world in which data may be more important than software.
Tim O'Reilly
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration.
Tim O'Reilly
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. The Vulgar sham of the pompous feast Where the heaviest purse is the highest priest The organised charity, scrimped and iced In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ."1 - John Boyle O'Reilly
Tim Pat Coogan
#47. We often get blinded by the forms in which content is produced, rather than the job that the content does.
Tim O'Reilly
#48. Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Tim O'Reilly
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn't be about the money.
Tim O'Reilly
#52. 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
#53. Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.
Tim O'Brien
#54. I could feel my moral compass as a soldier, in danger of - I could feel the squeeze, the pressure of frustration and anger and fear combining on me ... I felt the danger; I felt the squeeze of it.
Tim O'Brien
#55. What is love, for God's sake, if not the most distilled obsession?
Tim O'Brien
#56. Taking the sweatshirt, he raised it to his face and sniffed the bloodstains left on it.
Tim O'Rourke
#57. In a war without aim, you tend not to aim. You close your eyes, close your heart. The consequences become hit or miss in the most literal sense.
Tim O'Brien
#59. What do you do when you get a draft notice and you think a war is wrong? And I struggled with that for months prior to my being inducted into the army, and I'm still struggling with it, 40 years later.
Tim O'Brien
#60. I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously.
Tim O'Brien
#61. Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?
Tim O'Brien
#62. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.
Tim O'Brien
#63. It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing.
Tim O'Brien
#64. My original business model - I actually wrote this down - was 'interesting work for interesting people.'
Tim O'Reilly
#65. The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.
Tim O'Brien
#67. I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.
Tim O'Brien
#68. That you don't make war without knowing why.
Tim O'Brien
#69. The future is always scary to those who cling to the past.
Tim O'Reilly
#70. I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology.
Tim O'Brien
#71. Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.
Tim O'Brien
#72. You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in.
Tim O'Brien
#73. I personally own six or seven thousand books, so I - and I certainly don't want to see them go away.
Tim O'Reilly
#74. You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you know for a fact that you can't ever bring any of it back again. You just can't.
Tim O'Brien
#76. Hear that quiet, man?' he said. 'That quiet - just listen. There's your moral.
Tim O'Brien
#78. An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.
Tim O'Reilly
#79. 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
#80. The problem for most artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity.
Tim O'Reilly
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. We don't market products narrowly. We market big stories about the industry, things that matter to a lot of people.
Tim O'Reilly
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.
Tim O'Reilly
#90. Share what you do profusely, because it will be remixed by others into something new, rich and strange.
Tim O'Reilly
#91. There are more than 21 eBook channels already. Authors can't possibly get to these and do what they do best.
Tim O'Reilly
#92. What new technology does is create new opportunities to do a job that customers want done.
Tim O'Reilly
#93. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
Tim O'Brien
#94. He believed in mission. But . . . he did not believe in it as an intellectual imperative, or even as a professional standard. Mission . . . was an abstract notion that took meaning in concrete situations.
Tim O'Brien
#95. Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.
Tim O'Brien
#97. Obscurity is a bigger problem for authors than piracy.
Tim O'Reilly
#98. In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.
Tim O'Brien
#99. Every Hero Becomes a Bore at last." Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tim O. Casey
#100. 'The Things They Carried' is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real ... I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir.
Tim O'Brien
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