Tim O'Reilly

I came up with the idea that I wanted to develop products because I saw services businesses being a dead end long term.

Who was the first person to fly across the Atlantic? Lindbergh. Who was the second? No idea.

A lot of the websites built through the 1990s used Perl. The first webmaster of Sun Microsystems coined a wonderful phrase. He said Perl is the duck tape of the Internet - it's this language that people would write all these scripts that make things just work.

Proprietary software grew up, starting really in the 1980s, as an alternative and that became the dominant model with the rise of companies like Microsoft and Oracle and the like.

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.

One of the big changes at the heart of Web 2.0 is the shift from the creation of software artifacts, which is what the PC revolution was about, to the creation of software services. These are services that ultimately, if they are successful, will require competencies of operation, of scale, and the like.

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.

It's hard to make something as large as a government change. It's a little bit like building the transcontinental railroad.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

There are a lot of lousy conferences that pander to sponsors. They end up creating an opportunity for boring speakers who are paid shills for their companies. We still get a few of those, but we really try to police it. Think about who the audience is and what works for them, and deliver high-quality content.

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.

I believe that the human motive to share is very powerful. The human motive to profit is also very powerful, and I think that the profit motive and the sharing motive are not exclusive.

The fact that there's all these really messed-up people on the Internet is not a statement about the Internet. It is a statement about those people and what they do, and we need to basically say that you guys are doing something unacceptable and not generalise it into a comment about 'this is what's happening to the blogosphere.'

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.

Everybody's enamored of the iPhone, the Google phone. But the applications are going to change. You know, we're going to start using our phones for shopping. It's going to change the nature of advertising.