Tim O'Reilly Quotes

In the private sector, there is always innovation. There's always change. There's always improving productivity, and if you're not leading that, you'll be passed and ultimately go out of business. So there's an urgency to constantly update and renew and to rethink your enterprise.

Companies that grow for the sake of growth or that expand into areas outside their core business strategy often stumble. On the other hand, companies that build scale for the benefit of their customers and shareholders more often succeed over time.

Basically if you study entrepreneurs, there is a misnomer: People think that entrepreneurs take risk, and they get rewarded because they take risk. In reality entrepreneurs do everything they can to minimize risk. They are not interested in taking risk. They want free lunches and they go after free lunches.

I look at every business and ask, How long can this last? How can I identify the status quo and change it?

Google worries - and rightly so - about how hard it is for a big company to come up with the next hot thing.

A lot of web companies will take a short-term approach and sell to an incumbent and don't end up living up to their full potential.

Innovation must lead infrastructure for a simple but compelling reason: Innovation produces new types of products and markets, and it is virtually impossible to know how to run those markets efficiently before they are created.

Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.

There is no resting place for an enterprise in a competitive economy.

When you're a large company with significant market share, it's tempting to view market disruptions as a threat, but we view them as an opportunity.

By doing what they must do to keep their margins strong and their stock price healthy, every company paves the way for its own disruption.

The most essential thing for us was to get the business model right, then put the world-class technology under it to support it. At Merrill, that meant not doing what people expected.

Assuming a specific resource is high cost is often a path to disruption when someone makes a different assumption.

Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.

From a product development perspective, choosing whether a technology is disruptive at a potential moment is key.

We recognize the need to adapt to a changing competitive environment.

The emphasis on innovation and technology in our companies has resulted in a few of them establishing global benchmarks in product design and development, manufacturing practices and human resource capabilities. However, there is no room for complacency.

Efficiency innovations provide return on investment in 12-18 months. Empowering innovations take 5-10 years to yield a return. We have ample capital - oceans of capital - that is being reinvested into efficiency innovation.

Whatever business you're in - it doesn't matter - it's going to commoditize over time. It's going to devalue. You've got to keep moving it to a higher value.

Volkswagen must continue to attack and make good use of its opportunities.

... whatever business you're in, it doesn't matter, it's going to commoditize over time, it's going to devalue, you've got to keep moving it to a higher value. Keep going to a higher value in whatever it is that you do and force yourself and force the organization to always do it ahead of time

Businesses will ultimately go where the markets and opportunities are.

Unless you stay focused on innovation, you can be disintermediated.

To thrive, all businesses must focus on the art of self-disruption. Rather than wait for the competition to steal your business, every founder and employee needs to be willing to cannibalize their existing revenue streams in order to create new ones. All disruption starts with introspection.

I see business as an ecosystem.