"What new technology does is create new opportunities to do a job that customers want done"
About this Quote
O'Reilly cuts through Silicon Valley's favorite fairy tale: that innovation is inherently disruptive, heroic, and self-justifying. He reframes technology as something closer to plumbing than prophecy. The point isn't the gadget; it's the job. That simple pivot quietly demotes inventors from visionaries to service workers in a market drama where the customer remains the protagonist.
The intent is corrective. In a culture trained to fetishize "new", O'Reilly insists that novelty earns its keep only when it expands the menu of useful outcomes. "Create new opportunities" is doing a lot of work here: technology doesn't magically deliver value, it opens possibilities that still require design, distribution, trust, and adoption. It also implies a check on techno-utopian rhetoric. If the job customers want done doesn't change, then the "revolution" is mostly cosmetic; if the job does change, it's because technology altered what people can reasonably expect from the world.
The subtext is strategic advice to builders and investors: stop selling features, start mapping human needs and constraints. It's a nod to the "jobs to be done" school of thinking, but with a publisher's pragmatism. O'Reilly, who helped narrate the rise of open source and Web 2.0, learned early that platforms win when they lower friction for existing desires (publish, connect, buy, learn) and then scale those desires into new behaviors.
In one sentence, he recasts progress as customer-facing leverage, not engineering theater.
The intent is corrective. In a culture trained to fetishize "new", O'Reilly insists that novelty earns its keep only when it expands the menu of useful outcomes. "Create new opportunities" is doing a lot of work here: technology doesn't magically deliver value, it opens possibilities that still require design, distribution, trust, and adoption. It also implies a check on techno-utopian rhetoric. If the job customers want done doesn't change, then the "revolution" is mostly cosmetic; if the job does change, it's because technology altered what people can reasonably expect from the world.
The subtext is strategic advice to builders and investors: stop selling features, start mapping human needs and constraints. It's a nod to the "jobs to be done" school of thinking, but with a publisher's pragmatism. O'Reilly, who helped narrate the rise of open source and Web 2.0, learned early that platforms win when they lower friction for existing desires (publish, connect, buy, learn) and then scale those desires into new behaviors.
In one sentence, he recasts progress as customer-facing leverage, not engineering theater.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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