Tim O'Reilly Technology 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.