Tim O'Reilly Quotes

Every technological revolution takes about 50 years.

A lot of the work in United States is highly critical of technology. I'm using 15,000 watts of power and 18 different pieces of electronic equipment to say that.

The problem is that there are very few technologies that essentially haven't changed for 60, 70 years.

Tech innovation is something societies have to pursue as vigorously as they can. We have to innovate civically and socially at the same rate; otherwise, you create unfortunate disruptions, and that's where you have people opposing technological innovations.

When you look at the actual data on technological innovation, one thing you see is that what I call the 'low-hanging fruit' has been exhausted. So radio, flush toilets, electricity, and automobiles - a lot of very basic inventions - have spread to almost all households.

Technology is rooted in the past. It dominates the present and tends into the future. It is a real historical movement - one of the great movements which shape and represent their epoch.

The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.

I wrote 'Time of the Dark' in 1978 and 'The Silent Tower' in 1984, so the thing that sticks out for me is how totally technology has changed. I suppose that's the great peril for real-world crossovers.

Name anything - high-definition TV, computer obsolescence - and I'm pretty much annoyed by it.

People see technology as something that will ruin society and culture, but I've always embraced technology.

Whenever culture has gone through a radical change, as ours has - from industrial age to information age - there are people who will deny that things have changed; they resist it and refuse to change.

'The Victorian Internet' is a must read for anyone interested in the history of technology and in the cycles of hype, boom, and bust that seem to only quicken with each new wave of innovation. Highly recommended.

Congress commissioned the first telegraph line, the railroads, the Internet. The role of the government in developing new technology is often misunderstood.

… a pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons..

People tend to overestimate the short-term impact of technological change. In the short-term, it's not going to make that much of a difference.

With any advent in technology, any technological innovation, there is the good and the bad.

One thing about technology is that there's always a win, place, and show, and everyone else goes under.

Technology business increasingly becomes difficult to predict because technology itself is accelerating in change, and human nature and markets are more stagnant and static. But the dynamic engine of technological innovation continues unabated.

The tech genie is out of the bottle; you can't put it back in.

Putting our heads in the sand won't stop the inexorable advancement of technology.

The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability, and something is bound to come of it.

It's a fact: stock investors sometimes lose money on their way to wealth. Get over it.

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

We are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet.

In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety.