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33 Wonderful Tim O’Reilly Quotes

Tim O’Reilly is the founder of O’Reilly Media and has popularized the terms open source and Web 2.0. The founder of Safari Books Online and more, there are quote a few causes that Tim O’Reilly is known to have fought for. Here is a look at some of the best collective Tim O’Reilly quotes to know.

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

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

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

“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.”

“Being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong.”

“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.”

“Create more value than you capture.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“It’s a great discipline to have to report to somebody, even if you’re the sole owner.”

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

“Life is not a tour of gas stations.”

“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.”

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

“Obscurity is a bigger problem for authors than piracy.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“The nice thing about twitter is the architecture of visibility. Email is invisible unless you reach out to someone directly.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Who has the data has the power.”

“You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn’t be about the money.”

Tim O’Reilly discusses the future of business intelligence and how data collection has changed the traditional model of business.

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