Opera Founder Jon S. von Tetzchner Resigns 222
fysdt writes with this excerpt from TechCrunch:
"Opera founder Jon S. von Tetzchner has resigned from the company. In an email to Opera employees, von Tetzchner said that 'It has become clear that The Board, Management and I do not share the same values and we do not have the same opinions on how to keep evolving Opera. As a result I have come to an agreement with the Board to end my time at Opera. I feel the Board and Management is more quarterly focused than me.'"
So, will he continue to use Opera? (Score:5, Funny)
If not, that'll cut their usage share by half.
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Does anyone force Opera on their customers as Apple forces Safari on their iPhone users?
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How does Apple force Safari on iPhone users when you can trivially easily replace that browser with dozens of other choices with a few clicks?
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It might not be big in the US, but it's huge in many parts of the world. The mobile version in particular is completely dominant in many countries, especially emerging markets.
The world is bigger than the US, you know.
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It has 200 million actual users.
And you say this based on what? That Opera claims it as so?
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Of which you failed to link to.
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Since you're too lazy to Just Fucking Google It, take a look at Opera's financial reports [opera.com] (see p.3 of the 2011Q1 presentation). You can argue with them about their user count.
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So get off your lazy ass and find it.
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Its been a few years but Opera was my choice for web browser on blackberry. It wouldn't shock me if 1/2 of all blackberry users use Opera, so that's like 50m right there.
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You are making the assumption that each web user only ever uses one browser.
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No it would be mean 10b web using devices total. That may be true. Computers outnumber people in most 3rd world countries. Now add phones, ereaders, tablets, game consoles. I don't have any problem with a 10b figure.
Ouch (Score:5, Insightful)
Opera has been a damn good browser, and the focus of the company Opera has always been producing a damn good browser. If the focus becomes quarterly profit, I don't see much of a future for the Opera browser.
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Opera has been a damn good browser, and the focus of the company Opera has always been producing a damn good browser. If the focus becomes quarterly profit, I don't see much of a future for the Opera browser.
Unless they can make such a damn good browser people would be willing to pay for it.
Considering they moved away from a paid model, yeah...
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Your point being? They did move away from that, and now have more than 200 million users on desktop+mobile+devices.
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I used to use it back in Windows 95 times, and I did pay for a version way back then. It was, at the time, the fastest browser out there. It switched to an ad-supported model, then the GUI ads disappeared, so I don't really know how they made ends meet... I don't use it much nowadays.
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Really? I downloaded Opera Mini for my Android at no cost. Did the same on my ancient Windows Mobile. How exactly are they charging for those?
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Um, no. The mobile browsers are free to download. And the desktop version is more than 1/3 of the company's total revenue. Where are you getting your nonsensical claims from?
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What does that mean? Turning a profit is evil?
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No, that means focusing on the short term alone is likely to be bad for the long term.
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What makes you think anyone is going to focus on the short term alone?
How about this?
I feel the Board and Management is more quarterly focused than me
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How about someone familiar with the company and product feels that the company has become detrimentally focused on the short term. You are correct that does not mean short term alone, but it seems he feels it means too much focus on making certain numbers on certain dates and not enough focus on improving the browser itself.
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... in his opinion. We don't have any way of knowing if he's right, or the board's right (they have much more focus on keeping the doors open, and if the company has investors, they probably want to see an exit strategy, like selling stock in a company that's worth something). He may be too 'pure' to run a business at this level. Most business management tends to be good at a certain size, and not so good as the company expands to the next level. The company may have simply outgrown him. I don't know i
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No of course the man is not opposed to making a profit, quite the contrary.
The man is against short term and short sighted policies, he prefers to have a future horizon that's more than 13 weeks ahead.BR> A perfectly sensible thing to do.
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In fact, the company believes that the real big money will not be made until a few years from now. They may be profitable right now, but their aim is long-term profitability, and they
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But judging by his public statement we can safely assume he wanted a longer term goal while the Board wanted more focus on the short term results.
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No we can't. We can conclude that he said something about "more on quarterly results", and the fact is that after he stepped down, Opera has been able to both deliver quarterly profits and set up projects and strategies for the long term. Maybe he wanted them to ignore quarterly profits, but clearly it was time for Opera to deliver on something after 15 years in
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Maybe he felt there should be more focus on long-term goals and less focus on short-term goals. That is, after all, what he said. It's not a binary thing. He felt it was too much of one and not enough of the other.
No surprises here (Score:5, Insightful)
Business guys want short-term profit at all costs. Technical guys want long-term technical excellence which is better in the long run but not as profitable in the short run. Because the business guys have the dough, they win in a for-profit business.
That (in a nutshell) is why for-profit business cannot be the driver of excellence in software.
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I'm sure some business decisions are long term based. Like .NET, or CUDA, or research generally.
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Panicky investors and the business guys who live in perpetual fear of them want short-term profit at all costs
FTFY.
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It's actually not panicky investors, but investors who can very easily move their cash to greener pastures.
Imagine a world with 2 investment possibilities: Company A is growing at a steady 5% and is likely to continue that easily over the next 5 years. Company B is growing at a very unstable 15%, and is likely to blow up in about 6 months. Our rational investor will want to invest in company B for the next 5 months, then go back and move their money into company A. If the investor moves his cash, it's quite
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Mod this up! Few people realize that rational can be destructive.
Re:No surprises here (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes and No. I've beaten my head against developers who see their code as sacred and are unwilling to put it in the hands of users.
That obsession with perfection can often prevent "good enough" software from being put to good use "before it's ready". And then I often find that the developers are working in too much isolation and lose the incredibly valuable feedback from being used 'in the wild'.
Re:No surprises here (Score:4)
"...profit at all costs."
You know that's an oxymoron right?
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It's not. Not at all. Cost-cutting is a common approach to short-term profits, often leading to lower quality which may cost money in the long term as the product no longer sells.
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You do realize that while those are included in the term "all costs," so are the monetary ones, right? Right?
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I'm sure the statement was oreinted toward costs like making 80% of your salaried workforce work a few back-to-back 80 hour work-weeks (without overtime) *just* to make a quarterly target and cause a mass departure of top talent. On a related note, massive layoffs before quarterly results to make the bottom line look better and then have to hire back up in 6 months to keep yourself from going under.
However, I do sometimes see business obviously incur massive *monetary* costs in the name of profit, just us
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Is Google driving excellence? Is Apple driving excellence? Can you think of no for-profit business that drive excellence in software?
How about you mention someone who does drive excellence in software, then?
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If business guys wanted "short-term profit at all costs", they would all immediately liquidate their businesses in order to show extremely high short-term profit. The vast majority of businesses don't want "short-term profit at all costs", they want long-term growth out of investment expenditure.
Hard to compete with free.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hint: Opera is making money in several different ways without charging users directly.
Fastmail (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't use the Opera browser but I do have an account at Fastmail (an Opera company). I wonder if they'll be affected by this dustup.
Opera is my favorite browser (Score:4)
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The devs are fixing huge amounts of bugs. Just check out the changelogs they are posting with every new alpha build.
Fork'd (Score:5, Interesting)
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What would be the point? 2 versions of an irrelevant browser?
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What does the fact that you bite the heads off of chickens have to do with my question?
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The guy took the company public. He made bucketloads of money that way. And we should somehow feel sorry for him for being filthy rich?
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What makes you think the direction is going to change?
And as for those worki
Opera is going the wrong way (Score:5, Interesting)
I met Jon years ago, and found him to be a great guy. The company at the time was focused on making a good browser for power users, and they did that really well. It also helped that back then they were focused on performance and working on older systems.
At some point I noticed things changing years later. Opera got bigger, and slower. UI stuff that worked forever was broken in favor of a less flexible Firefox clone model. Attention was diverted to writing an email client. Then a BitTorrent client. Then a web server built into the browser. I only wish I was making that last one up [opera.com].
The company lost focus on what made Opera good in the first place as they went from trying to be a good, fast browser to trying to do everything for everybody. Finally I stopped using it when the drift got so bad that it wasn't really better then Firefox at anything.
This drift coincided with the company growing in size and it being less about how it started: Jon and a few other guys trying to make a good browser.
Re:Opera is going the wrong way (Score:5, Interesting)
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Then a web server built into the browser.
I'll get flamed for this but I love the web server that is built in. I use it instead of throwing stuff up to websites like senduit and the like. SO much easier and cleaner from my end. I haven't really worked on the photo sharing piece of unite yet however. That's something else too. Granted, their E-mail and torrent program is shite but their RSS feeder is the best I've used by miles and miles. Nobody has come close.
Re:Opera is going the wrong way (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it was never just a browser. Even the first public version did mail, newsgroups, and more. Furthermore, site compatibility was a huge problem in the early days, and until recently. Opera now works with more sites than ever.
Good thing Opera is currently one of the fastest browsers, and still runs on slow hardware, them.
On the contrary. Opera is now faster than ever. It got bigger because it now handles a lot more open web standards and technologies than it used to. You'll notice that most of the growth comes from adding support for new web standards, and adding workarounds for broken sites.
Such as?
What are you talking about? The BitTorrent hasn't received a single update in several years. Mail was there from the very first public version, but was also left nearly untouched until quite recently, when they made a new mail panel for 11.0 or something like that.
It is clear that you have no idea what you are talking about.
Unite might be a web server, but what it enables is direct communication between devices. Opera is not just a desktop browser, but actually a cross-platform browser.
Once again you are getting it completely wrong. Opera has always been doing more than just browser.
You must be drunk or something. Jon himself wanted Opera to be everything for everyone. He was constantly going on about how great that was in various interviews.
Clearly, you are completely clueless about Opera's history.
Re:Opera is going the wrong way (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, it was never just a browser. Even the first public version did mail, newsgroups, and more. Furthermore, site compatibility was a huge problem in the early days, and until recently. Opera now works with more sites than ever.
Opera 3 had rudimentary support, at best. Considerable effort was spent in creating M2 (the mail client in later versions) after the fact when they should have been focusing on the browser.
Good thing Opera is currently one of the fastest browsers, and still runs on slow hardware, them.
On the contrary. Opera is now faster than ever. It got bigger because it now handles a lot more open web standards and technologies than it used to. You'll notice that most of the growth comes from adding support for new web standards, and adding workarounds for broken sites.
Not in my experience. Opera lost most of its performance advantage several versions ago. They've probably regained some of it recently compared to Firefox because FF 4 is such a pig, but that's hardly a credit to them and more of a condemnation of Mozilla.
Such as?
Couple of the many that annoyed me:
In early versions if you closed the browser with multiple windows open, reopening the browser later would reload those windows from the server. They changed that later so that it would reload the cached versions, completely ignoring cache settings and bringing up stuff that could be *days* since expired. When I stopped using it, it was still doing that. Firefox does the same thing.
They also changed from the nice windowing model Opera 6 had to a less functional tab style version around Opera 9 (or maybe 10) where you couldn't layer things around inside the same window anymore, instead you had to split the tab off into its own window and then do it. Hell, Opera 3's MDI was more capable of that.
What are you talking about? The BitTorrent hasn't received a single update in several years. Mail was there from the very first public version, but was also left nearly untouched until quite recently, when they made a new mail panel for 11.0 or something like that.
The BitTorrent client was built before it was ignored, which was attention spent on something that was never needed. And really, ignoring stuff that needs work is the Opera way in some things. They had a great custom search functionality years before anybody else, but had no UI to edit it and sent people off to edit ini files instead. That's certainly fine in the first version it appears, but they left it that way for years to play around with other stuff instead.
Mail was there in some form in Opera 3, then totally redone in later versions, then ignored for a while.
It is clear that you have no idea what you are talking about.
Really? You're the one telling me the same mail client has been there all along when it really wasn't. They called it "M2" for a reason, and it wasn't because it was the first version.
Unite might be a web server, but what it enables is direct communication between devices. Opera is not just a desktop browser, but actually a cross-platform browser.
Unite is a web server stuck inside a web browser. It'd make more sense as a standalone app so that people could A) not install it, and B) keep it running after closing the browser. (Maybe they fixed B since I stopped using Opera, the first time they didn't fix windowing issues and instead announced a web server I decided I was done with them.)
You must be drunk or something. Jon himself wanted Opera to be everything for everyone. He was constantly going on about how great that was in various interviews./quote?
Jon was the CEO until last year. Have you EVER heard a CEO go on an interview and say "yeah we're doing this shit all wrong"?
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There was a full e-mail client in Opera 4. M2 came with Opera 7, and has barely been touched for extended periods. For example, until the recent mail panel facelift, it had been dormant for a long time. So yes, Opera has indeed been doing more than just a browser since day 1, and the non-browser parts have often suffered
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You'll notice that most of the growth comes from adding support for new web standards, and adding workarounds for broken sites.
And therein lies the rub. A browser should never, never incorporate workarounds for broken sites. The broken sites should be fixed. End. Of. Story.
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For the most part, if not entirely, the only thing that is incorporated are codes/methods/etc that can crash/freeze the browser, which is entirely expected.
The website fixing parts are done by BrowserJS [opera.com] (currently a 106KB JS file) which can be disabled.
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lol, that is to say fixing those things... although yes, they do incorporate their own bugs too.
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And are you saying that "render gradients" is the only standard there is? That everything else doesn't count? So even if Opera does support SVG, HTML5, etc., that's irrelevant because of perhaps one CSS property or one single bug?
Wow.
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I guess you are just trolling.
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Whether BitTorrent is needed or not is not up to you.
Widgets are getting huge. Opera is selling widgets solutions to mobile manufacturers, operators, TV manufacturers, etc. It's a waste of time to make money now?
Lots of power user suggestions have gotten attention. But Opera has limited resources, and they can't spend their time only listening to a tiny g
Short term vs long term. (Score:5, Insightful)
"the Board and Management is more quarterly focused than me."
That's it. Stick a fork in it. Opera is done.
It will go up for sale within the year, get bought out, and disappear. Because the board needs its golden parachutes.
--
BMO
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Because it will be bought out by a company to "increase its holdings" whereupon it will be milked for what it's worth and be left to die. No updates, nothing. This is especially true if it is a financial company or a "group of investors." - R&D and development are "overhead." It is "better" for them to get what they can and run with the profits.
Because actually running a company requires work.
A rather infamous example is Partition Magic. It was bought by Symantec and never received an update in its
you might describe this development as (Score:3)
operatic
Should have seen it coming (Score:4, Funny)
I mean, what could one really expect from Opera if not Drama?
Re:Sad news (Score:5, Insightful)
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It is when you're more interested in short term profits than long term costumer satisfaction.
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Yea, FYI from http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/862816-opera-ceo-steps-down-immediately-replaced/ [neowin.net] :
After delivering strong results over over several quarters, Opera slumped to a surprise loss in the third quarter of 2009.
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As I recall, the free downloaded version includes some hooks for Opera to make money from advertisers. IIRC they are discreet and don't get in the way much but I haven't used it for a while. In fact I just started it up and looked around, and can't find any advertising-type things, so it must be very discreet. If you pay for it, those advertising things disappear.
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Not always. FYI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)#History [wikipedia.org]
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In fairness to the parent, Opera used to require payment. Then they gave you the choice to download a free but ad-supported client. There could still be some cruft from that edition hanging around in the current code.
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Not always.
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MS certainly didn't help by making IE free, helped by the Windows monopoly.
Re:Quarterly Focused? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, though it's a little more complex (Score:2)
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Right. It is also a lofty goal to focus on hitting budget numbers for the next quarter, but that has to be balanced by long term strategy, or the long term goals will get shafted.
OP left out a fairly important 'more', suggesting Tetzchner and the board disagreed over the balance between the two rather than either of them wanting 100% of one or the other.
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Precisely, at the extreme end there is a trivial way to 'hit EBITDA targets' and that's to liquidate assets.
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That, or Opera's execs want to join hands and start a version-inflation train, a version-inflation train...
(Yes, I know those make terrible lyrics; they go well with the terrible trendy strategy.)
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Really? So how do you explain their soaring profits and fast growth in all areas? What long-term objectives are they ignoring, exactly?