Tim O'Reilly Quotations

Why did Google, for example, recently decide to offer free 411 service? I haven't talked to people at Google, but it's pretty clear to me why. It's because of speech recognition. It has nothing to do with 411 service: it has to do with getting a database of voices, so they don't have to license speech technology from Nuance or someone else.

Conferences are really like parties, and an A-list party is one where A-list people are in attendance. You figure out who are the really important people to invite and get them to show up as speakers or as guests. Then everybody wants to be there. If you don't know who the important people are, you shouldn't be doing a conference.

My original business model - I actually wrote this down - was 'interesting work for interesting people.'

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.

What new technology does is create new opportunities to do a job that customers want done.

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.

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.

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.

An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.

We're entering a new world in which data may be more important than software.

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.

The thing we should all be looking for are people who want to make a difference. I'm a big believer in the Silicon Valley religion of the power of markets. But I also believe in our obligation to give back, and to give back in the way we do business, to create more value than we capture for ourselves.

You grow great crops in great soil. And the soil is the commons. Increasingly, we have monopolistic companies that try to take as much as they can for themselves. And we have a patent and copyright regime that makes sure that nothing goes back into the commons unless by an extraordinary act of generosity. This is not fertile soil for innovation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration.

If companies don't think systemically enough - if they try to capture too much of the value - eventually, innovation moves somewhere else.

We often get blinded by the forms in which content is produced, rather than the job that the content does.

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.

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.

I find that creative streak I think often leads in programmers to be good predictors of where culture as a whole is going to go. And that is where I think I've tried over the years to in some ways use my customers as a filter or a predictor of where technology as a whole is going to go. Or where the world as a whole is going to go.

People don't care about books. They care about ideas.

Who was the first person to fly across the Atlantic? Lindbergh. Who was the second? No idea.

I think that companies always become complacent, over time. Or most companies, that is.

We want to show how technology can be applied to fix our problems. We need to celebrate not just success but to celebrate people who make a difference. It starts with people who do things for love, with no expectation of return. Some of that turns into enormous financial success, and then some of it goes back into doing it for love.

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.

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.

One of the big changes at the heart of Web 2.0 is the shift from the creation of software artifacts, which is what the PC revolution was about, to the creation of software services. These are services that ultimately, if they are successful, will require competencies of operation, of scale, and the like.

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.

I came up with the idea that I wanted to develop products because I saw services businesses being a dead end long term.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The fact that there's all these really messed-up people on the Internet is not a statement about the Internet. It is a statement about those people and what they do, and we need to basically say that you guys are doing something unacceptable and not generalise it into a comment about 'this is what's happening to the blogosphere.'

There are a lot of lousy conferences that pander to sponsors. They end up creating an opportunity for boring speakers who are paid shills for their companies. We still get a few of those, but we really try to police it. Think about who the audience is and what works for them, and deliver high-quality content.

We don't market products narrowly. We market big stories about the industry, things that matter to a lot of people.

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.

Everybody who goes into government gets somewhat chewed up in the process. Being a senior appointee is like being at a startup, only more so: You run into opposition from the entrenched oligopoly of contractors whose business model is to extract as much money from government as possible for doing as little as possible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's hard to make something as large as a government change. It's a little bit like building the transcontinental railroad.

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.

I guess I would just say that in general, one of my weaknesses is that I love everything. There's too much of everything to keep up with it all. I get bored with Silicon Valley technology a lot. I've always had much more of a draw to the people who are doing things for love than the people who are doing things for money.

I personally own six or seven thousand books, so I - and I certainly don't want to see them go away.

I'd love to have the time to learn to sing opera properly rather than bellowing half-formed fragments of melody in exuberant moments.

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.

You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn't be about the money.

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.

A key function of a publishing brand is the bestowal of status by who and what you pay attention to.

In social networks, you gain and bestow status through those you associate with.

There are more than 21 eBook channels already. Authors can’t possibly get to these and do what they do best.

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.

Create more value than you capture.

Life is not a tour of gas stations.

Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.

The nice thing about twitter is the architecture of visibility. Email is invisible unless you reach out to someone directly. With Twitter, anyone can follow you and this is one of the big changes that was really introduced by Flickr, was this wonderful idea that you can follow somebody without their permission. Recognizing that relationships are asymmetrical, unlike facebook where we have to acknowledge each other otherwise we can’t see each other.

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.

Being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong.

My basic belief is you need to ride the horse in the direction that it's going.

Architecture trumps licensing any time.

Data is the next Intel Inside.

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.

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.

Share what you do profusely, because it will be remixed by others into something new, rich and strange.

The biggest mistake we see companies make when they first hit Twitter is to think about it as a channel to push out information.

No matter your sector, chances are that people are already twittering about your products, your brand, your company or at least your industry.

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.

Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

It's a great discipline to have to report to somebody, even if you're the sole owner

Who has the data has the power.

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.

Just do something that lights you up, and lights up your customers, and lights up the world and scale to that.

The Lean Startup isn't just about how to create a more successful entrepreneurial business, it's about what we can learn from those businesses to improve virtually everything we do. I imagine Lean Startup principles applied to government programs, to healthcare, and to solving the world's great problems. It's ultimately an answer to the question: How can we learn more quickly what works, and discard what doesn't?

Obscurity is a bigger problem for authors than piracy.

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.

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.

Programming is how we talk to the machines that are increasingly woven into our lives. If you aren't a programmer, you're like one of the unlettered people of the Middle Ages who were told what to think by the literate priesthood. We had a Renaissance when more people could read and write; we'll have another one when everyone programs.

The future is always scary to those who cling to the past.

The problem for most artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity.

A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books.