Tim O'Reilly Quotes

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

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

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

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

Being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong.

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

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

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

Data is the next Intel Inside.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Architecture trumps licensing any time.

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

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.

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.

Obscurity is a bigger problem for authors than piracy.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

Who has the data has the power.

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

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.

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.

Life is not a tour of gas stations.

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.

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.

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

Create more value than you capture.

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.

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.