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
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. – Tim O’Reilly
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
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
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
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. – Tim O’Reilly
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
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
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
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. – Tim O’Reilly
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
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
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
What new technology does is create new opportunities to do a job that customers want done. – Tim O’Reilly
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
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
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
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
The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration. – Tim O’Reilly
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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. – Tim O’Reilly
Who was the first person to fly across the Atlantic? Lindbergh. Who was the second? No idea. – Tim O’Reilly
