Tim OReilly Quotes (25 Quotes)

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.

We knew we had a good team coming back, and that the district was going to be tough,

(Open source) will just be part of how you do business.

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.

People still like to meet face to face. That's how you glue together a community.

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

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.

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,

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

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.

afraid of the future. ... They want more time to study it.

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

People are going to change the world and accelerate change by spreading their knowledge.

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

When people understand what Microsoft is up to, they're outraged. They need to respond to public, as well as legal, pressure on this.

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.

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.

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

I just love that, ... 'Beneath every no lays a yes that had never been broken.' To me, there's this wonderful spirit . You know, 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.

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.

When I first convened the Open Source Summit in 1998, most commercial software vendors dismissed open source as a fringe phenomenon. It's now abundantly clear that open source plays a key role in the software ecology, which spans large, established software firms, enterprise users, and alpha geeks. Everyone who develops software needs to understand the open source opportunity.

I think in most cases it's just an example of companies trying to figure out what they have to do to make their services work. These are small companies. They have to ask, what does it take

It's back to 1995 where the Internet was this great rallying cry. One of the areas where Microsoft has a lead is that they are focusing on non-PC devices. That may be one of their secret weapons.

(Microsoft) clearly gets where the focus of the competition needs to be.