Category: Interviews
An Interview With Opera’s CEO, Jon von Tetzchner
The Register recently published an interview with Jon von Tetzchner and there are some very interesting questions and answers as well.
Andrew Brown, a big fan of Opera, wrote that he chose to move to FireFox because it was more compatible with new websites, partly citing Flickr compatibility. Do you feel you’re falling behind?
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It’s a chicken and egg situation, which means we need to get more users.
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I don’t want to agree with that. It’s not all about users. Of course, big market share helps a lot but let’s see the following situation:
Let’s say 1000 potential users decides to download Opera and surf their favorite sites, some of them found them incompatible with Opera. What they do? They are switching back. So you get more users for a week or so but then lose some of them due incompatibility with their favorite sites. Of course, market share still grows, but very slowly. As posted in 2007 July Browsers Market Share Results, Opera lost 0.02% of their market share that time. I tend to believe that decrease was not due the fact that users didn’t like Opera’s interface or features, but due incompatibility.
Opera can’t grow so fast due incompatibility with some sites.
Incompatible sites are incompatible due low Opera’s market share.
Paradox?
If Opera would get 20% of the market share in one night, this would help for sure. But that won’t happen.
So it’s up to Opera Software.
Another interesting answer was:
We just try to focus on our side. We’ve always focused on a somewhat richer interface. We’ve had a lot of negative comments ourselves over the years; for example, when we introduced tabbed browsing a lot of people said it doesn’t make sense. We’ve introduced things like zooming, mouse gestures and the like – and we find they find their way into other browsers; tabs found their way into IE7. We are being copied, but we would like to focus on features and giving users a good experience.
It’s fantastic that Opera is being copied, that means they are doing very good job in providing users best web experience, but how long can it happen? How long can you brainstorm and add new features without seeing rapid Opera’s market share growth while competitors with those new features becoming stronger (more popular). Why It’s Not Enough To Have All The Greatest Features?
