Opera Software Receives a New CEO

By | January 5, 2010 | 20 Comments

Now here is a bombshell. Today, Opera Software has announced that Jon S. von Tetzchner is stepping down from CEO position and will be replaced by Lars Boilesen, Opera’s current Chief Commercial Officer.

About Lars Boilesen

Boilesen has extensive sales and marketing experience and has held executive positions in various corporations including Opera Software where he was Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Prior to that, Lars headed the Northern Europe and Asia Pacific markets for Tandberg. Lars started his career at Lego Group where he was Sales and Marketing manager for Europe.

Opera Software Receives a New CEO

Only future can tell, what new winds Lars will bring to the company.

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About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • neko

    I hope we get interactive API at last.

  • osjan

    I hope Opera won’t make any moves towards some sort of 3rd party extensions/plugins under his reign.

  • http://www.pneumatig.com.pl pneumatyka

    Lars quote:
    “Our focus going forward is to execute on our current strategy and continue to deliver the best browser experience to the breadth of our customer and user base.”

    so rather no worries about extensions for Opera :P
    bleh, extensions, bleh, bad idea

  • opera singer

    Opera will never have the same extensions mechanism as Fierfox but it does nor mean it won’t have extensions at all…

  • http://my.opera.com/DanielHendrycks/ Daniel Hendrycks

    My jaw just dropped. Well, best of luck Lars.

    • nvm

      Why did your jaw drop?

      This is just like Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page. More time for actuall action, less time wasted on paperwork and stuff like that.

      • http://my.opera.com/DanielHendrycks/ Daniel Hendrycks

        It was so unexpected. Anyway, this transition is probably for the best.

  • nobody

    about damn time.

    extensions? why not? except paranoia and will of ‘being different’. extensions are what people want.

    but i hope that this new man will have some more cojones and stop pretending that world is rotating in different direction that all others think

    and maybe he will refresh QA department of opera. each time one of their staff talks about how do they handle bug reports, im no longer wondering why so much stuff isnt fixed.

    • http://my.opera.com/DanielHendrycks/ Daniel Hendrycks

      I propose a Q and A for the new CEO, questions provided by the Opera Community.

    • Crackerflack

      and maybe he will refresh QA department of opera. each time one of their staff talks about how do they handle bug reports, im no longer wondering why so much stuff isnt fixed.

      Opera has a professional and working QA department. They are delivering products to several major companies around the world. They would never be able to retain their customers if they didn’t have excellent QA.

      So your post sounds more like sour grapes than anything else. Perhaps you applied for a QA position and were rejected because of your poor qualifications?

  • http://www.pneumatig.com.pl pneumatyka

    I don’t understand people who say that extensions are what people want. Says who? Are there any research on this subject?

    Personally I believe that all people want is a good browser.
    I want a good, reliable, feature rich and light browser that follows the standards. I don’t want to spent time searching for some extensions. Besides I’m tired of this – at the moment my FF loads sooo long, I have about ten extensions, of which I use only firebug and adblock. I used webdev toolbar occasionally but it just don’t want to update from some time. Besides I’ve got some XML parsing error in new window each time I run FF. I’m tired of this.

    From the other side – I updated urlfilter.ini only once and it works like charm. And I can use dragonfly for most of the simple tasks (I admit – I have to use firebug sometimes, but dragonfly is much faster, especially on heavy pages). Besides I switched to Opera’s Mail Client from Thunderbird after waiting more then a year for T3 (now its too late – I’m not going back :P), and I use chat client a lot when I need to discuss work issues with some experts.
    I love panels – there are few very handy for everyday work, i like widgets, i enjoy unite (sharing GB’s of photos with my family from other side of a globe is instant now).

    I don’t care if its open source or not. I care about a good product. And Opera Software provides me a Good Product. I Really Believe that man Lars here will continue the good work (product).

    • cousin333

      I totally agree with you!

      However, Opera should support much more their existing “extensions”, like Unite, Widgets, userJS userCSS, content block… etc. By support I mean a better GUI for handle them, some ways to easily install, upgrade and remove them.

      • Daniel Hendrycks

        “By support I mean a better GUI for handle them, some ways to easily install, upgrade and remove them.”

        +1

      • http://www.pneumatig.com.pl pneumatyka

        Unite is fine IMHO.
        Widgets are moving outside of the browser, and they’ll get their own manager.
        The rest – userCss, userJs, contentBlocker could be achieved by opera unite, or widgets (with file I/O), so maybe that will happen in future.

        In fact there is GREAT UserJS unite application, which proves my point. It can be run inside panel, it allows for enabling, disabling, fast access to description, and even to whole code, besides it detects whenever javascript is opened in browser and asks if install it as userJS. What more do you need.
        Same could be done with others.

        • Daniel Hendrycks

          I was saying +1 to userJS. (A built in manager, etc.)

          • http://www.pneumatig.com.pl pneumatyka

            All you need is this:

            http://unite.opera.com/application/401/

            What more do you need from UserJS Manager??

          • http://my.opera.com/DanielHendrycks/ Daniel Hendrycks

            I’m just saying built in and not relient on other things. I am also requesting a launcher.

  • AY

    Some sites report the reason to be the 2 million USD loss that Opera suffered in Q3.

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