Opera's Prospects
Om Malik has an interview in Businesss 2.0 with Opera Software CEO Jon von Tetzchner about the browser's company strategy. A couple interesting points made by von Tetzchner are Opera's ambitious plans for the wireless market and the fact some people actually pay to use the software. To be honest, I'm not keen on Opera's prospects other than its abiity to serve niche markets. In May, Opera had only 0.51% of the browser marketing, according to Netapplications.com - ranking it even behind Netscape. As a former avid Opera user, I'm now far more excited about Firefox. Not sure why I tired of Opera given it is similar to Firefox but I think Opera had an opportunity at one time to gain major momentum against IE but it never really materialized.
July 29th, 2005 at 12:29 pm
Opera seems to think it can play the browser wars with Micorsoft and Mozilla. Interestingly, two Canadian companies had competitive offerings to Opera and chose different paths to market using different manifestations of the microbrowser… Espial in Ottawa moved away from wireless devices and into set-top boxes and other consumer internet devices. They have enjoyed some success there and have revenues in 8 figures now, I'm told.
Icesoft in Calgary bought the ICEbrowser from Wind River in 2002, which in turn had purchased a Norwegian company that came up with the technology. They don't sell to the device guys at all… the ISVs and large companies with Java apps love the ICEbrowser for control of the client end. The company just blew away the folks at JavaOne with their clever next generation client technology.