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Opera Purchase Rumour Control
We've had several submissions this morning concerning a CoolTechZone article stating that Microsoft has purchased Opera, seemingly confirming the Dvorak article we reported on yesterday. However, roblimo has followed up with Opera and found that to be (so far), less than true. Opera PR person Berit Hanson told Slashdot by phone from Oslo, Norway, that "last week it was Google, this week it's Microsoft." She laughed and added, "If I was working for Microsoft I think I'd know it, but I'm still in Oslo, not Washington, still working for Opera." Which, of course, is not to say it won't happen ... it just hasn't happened yet.
I wonder if government regulators would allow Microsoft to buy Opera at all. Wouldn't they see a problem with the company that controls 80%+ of a market buying out one of the few surviving competitors they have? There's Firefox, AOL... uh... Netscape doesn't count since it's a blend of Firefox and IE...
I mean, I don't know, I just can't see it being allowed.
Microsoft to buy Opera... maybe... not yet, but it could happen someday.
FASCINATING.
As progster on osnews speculated: "Microsoft wants it for the mobile market and they'll kill the pc version of opera."
Actually I heard that Opera was thinking of buying Microsoft.
Is for the Mozilla foundation buying Opera
The way the IE team has been killing themselves lately developing IE7, I'd be pretty surprised if MS turned around and bought Opera. It would also seem like an odd time to make the buy, given that IE7 ships next year.
I think I'll too have to call her about this rumour.
Opera is NOT a Qt app. The Unix version uses Qt for certain dialogs and such, but that's it. Windows and Mac Opera do not use Qt at all. They use a special GUI toolkit which they developed internally.
Slashdot. Counternews for nerds, Stuff that might matter one day... or not.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
If MS needs a new browser, which they don't, it would be FAR more strategic to use Firefox, a la Netscape. Even though they would not own the browser, and they would be returning some features back to the public, they could use new Firefox features to drive sales of their server based products.
There is no money in browsers (just ask Opera), but lots to be made in selling server software.
Christ! What's next? No more dupes? No more early "FreeBSD x has been released"?
An early New Years Resolution?
I'm speechless.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Isn't it obvious that this is just a result of someone confusing Dvorak's "they should buy Opera" into "they have bought Opera"? And it really is inconceivable that they would buy Opera. NFW.
If nothing else, Opera is getting noticed in a lot more places these days. I wonder how the downloads are going?
It very well could never happen. I have seen no evidence even suggesting that MS even wants Opera, other than a very speculative and not very well thought out article written by some troll. This is yellow journalism at its best, when someone comes out and refutes an entirely made up story, claim "it still could happen".
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
For linking to ANY article written by that idiot Dvorak. If Slashdot picks it up, his article gets steam and then other sites will make assumptions and false alerts based on shoddy reporting and opinions by the one and only, Dvorak.
God this really boggles the mind...
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I just read from www.icantbelieveitsnottrue.com that Microsoft has inked a deal with Al Gore to purchase the rights to the Internet.
{i blogged this and shamelessly copy-and-pasted it from http://fancy.se/ with lost links and formatting, but anyways}
There's a rumour that Microsoft has bought Opera software, makers of the (closed source) fast, cross-platform and lightweight Opera web browser, Opera mobile (Symbian S60, Windows mobile) and the recently released Opera mini (for Java phones).
It's not hard to understand why Microsoft would be interested. Opera is very standards compliant, more so than IE6 (and IE7 perhaps). Opera is obviously very well engineered, with a very fast renderer and extremely low memory footprint. Most importantly, Opera runs on platforms that Microsoft wants to reach out to and (in the end) dominate or conquer.
Such platforms are Symbian OS (in different series), a common OS for mobile phones. Opera rules that territory today.
Such platforms are Maemo (you've heard about Nokia 770, haven't you?), the exciting new open platform that Nokia puts work into, based on the Linux-kernel, X11 and GTK+, to name some open source technologies. Opera rules that territory today.
Such platforms are desktop Linux (Fedora Core, Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, Mandriva, Slackware, RHEL, CentOS, the list goes on..) with KDE (QT) and/or Gnome (GTK+) integration. Linux users today mainly use Firefox or Konqueror, desktop Linux are getting more and more momentum and Microsoft understands that. Microsoft wants to reach that platform, for the same reasons that they want to reach Mac OS X (although most OS X users runs Safari or Firefox), and compared to porting IE to Linux from scratch (which could be a huge project depending on their codebase) lots of time could be saved by going with Opera (which has a Linux QT-version today). I expect Microsoft to port Windows Media Player to Linux soon too, for the same reasons that they have it for OS X, but that's a different story.
Such platforms are Mac OS X, since the old Internet Explorer for Mac will receive no more updates after new-year and will cease to exist as a download a month after that. Apple releasing Safari (the Konqueror technology KHTML-based browser) for OS X was Microsofts worst nightmare, they lost their dominance (yes, most OS X users ran IE before that) in an increadibly short time. At first it looked liked they wouldn't do anything about it and keep a kind of wait-and-see attitude (halting all serious work on IE for Mac). They need to hold on to OS X, either Microsoft ports IE7 to Mac OS X (which they could as they've done it before, but i suspect it's a whole lot of work) or they try a short-cut - Opera.
Such platforms are Windows mobile, their own platform for handhelds and phones. Many users seem to prefer Opera before IE for this platform, with Microsoft buying Opera their dominance would be total (neither Firefox nor a KHTML-based browser are available for this platform).
And actually, such platforms are Windows XP and Vista. Microsoft wants to grab users from Opera and Firefox.
If this rumour is true and Microsoft will buy Opera, I expect Microsoft to merge the "full" Opera web browser with Internet Explorer, and release it as IE8. This won't happen until summer 2007 at earliest, and likely even later (due to their track record). IE7 will release as planned (first half 2006 or something) and not contain a single line of Opera-code (it's in beta already). I expect IE8 to be more like IE7 with some Opera-technology merged in rather than the opposite. This could be a huge project and Microsoft could choose to skip most of it. They will look into Opera's renderer though, and they will look into the cross-platform nature of Opera.
The bottom line is, buying Opera is a cheap (relatively speaking, you've seen all the TV-commercials for Xbox 360 haven't you?) ticket into other competitors territory for Microsoft. Grabbing existing Symbian userbase would probably be worth it alone.
They might also just as well buy it and discontinue the whole thing, trying to help sales for Windows Mobile as a
John Dvorak is like those crazy preachers that predict the end of the world every five years, and then every five years make adjustments to their original predicitons. He's the Charles Taze Russell or Ellen G. White of computing.
If I ate a mince pie for every end-of-year IT rumour on the net I'd have exploded by now.
The rather feverish interest in this stuff marks a real change. A year ago, it could have been announced that Microsoft had bought a B-52 and ten atomic bombs and everyone would have turned over and gone back to sleep. Now, the merest whiff of action on the Microsoft-Google-Yahoo front has the pundits running.
But I can't help wondering whether a little game of chicken is going on, with folks being bounced into buying something for fear the next guy will get it. Ebay and Skype, Google and AOL - these and others are not really matches made in heaven. It will be interesting to see how the dice have fallen on this craze in, say, a year's time. But I hope MS don't buy Opera, for a simple, selfish reason. I like using Opera, and I like it just the way it is.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Don't do it. They'll be forced to wear polyester suits with bell bottoms. Then there'll be a horrible accident and the moon will get blown out of Earth's orbit and send the moon and it's inhabitants on an interstellar journey encountering alien races and strange powerful forces. Wait...it's 2005 and that hasn't happened. Damn you Gerry and Sylvia Anderson! Damn you all to hell!!!
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
""If I was working for Microsoft I think I'd know it, but I'm still in Oslo, not Washington, still working for Opera.""
Which actually has a meaning of.... NOTHING.
It is not a confirmation, nor a denial - she has skipped around the question by making a joke. The reporter should ask her outright again to answer the question, or not quote at all.
The quote means nothing - she could be telling the truth, *and* know that Microsoft has taken over Opera *and* the quote would still be correct. (If MS took a majority stake in Opera, Operas employees wouldn't work for MS, they would work for Opera... *and* you can bet most jobs wouldn't be moving to Washington anyway).
I think it's because of this Digg "article": Microsoft Buys Out Opera that many people think it's true
I hear a lot of people use his keyboard layout.
um....the Jetsons, not Jeffersons.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
Next /. story: Dvorak unable to find posterior with both hands, proclaims demise of buttocks as we know them.
Next /. retraction: Arse in previous Dvorak stories positively identified, proven to exist. (Which, of course, is not to say that the disappearance of arses won't happen ... just that it hasn't happened yet.)
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
This is an incredibly big deal, not because of anything in the story itself, but because of those magic words "followed up by phone". Someone submitted what looked to the Slashdot editors like a really interesting story, but the credibility of which seemed a little flaky. They then *checked the story with a primary source* themselves. (OK, roblimo's working for OSDN rather than Slashdot, IIRC.) But this means that from now on when Slashdot runs a story that turns out to have been trivially falsifiable by a phone call or couple of emails, they can't use the excuse of "we just report what people submit". Fact chgecking... the thin end of a slippery wedge, if you ask me ;)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Come on. They've put how much time and money into developing IE7? No way they would do all that then scrap it for Opera. Not to say that Opera isn't better (I don't know). But it would be an incredible waste. If they were going to do such a thing, they would have bought Opera before they started developing IE7.
Microsoft and Google both have their own PR departments, and any purchase of Opera would be targeted at 1) the code, and 2) some of the developers. The rest of the employees would probably not know anything about it. At best, the owners of the company, a major shareholder or two, and possibly a few key people who need to be given an incentive to stick around after the acquisition will be informed. The rest may be kept on board as a gesture of good will or may be let go unceremoniously a few weeks later.
Amazing magic tricks
I don't know if they had any to begin with (they certainly aren't what I would consider a primary source of information), but they certainly have none now. The article, which was very simply proved false by roblimo's phone call, should have been checked before THEY posted it. They have a tiny update at the bottom now that basically says 'This is all bullshit. Thanks for playing.' which does not excuse their posting of it as a fait accompli in the first place. Yet another bullshit rumour website to cross off my list of sites worth looking at.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Amazing. Slashdot actually has a phone? And they were able to dial it and talk to a person to verify an "article" here? Wow. Hell must be really cold right now.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
I've been using Opera since Version 6 and have always liked its look and feel. But then I'm no browser zealot either. I use Firefox as well as NetCaptor and Konqueror, depending on how well they render specific websites. I like the way Opera and NetCaptor can save your open tabs after you close the browser and re-load all of them the next time you open it. I understand there is a Firefox extension that can provide this functionality, but I haven't yet found it, and I've looked through the extensions listings with no success. Probably need to google it somehow.
Back on the main topic, I disagree with Dvorak and think it would be a questionable business decision for MS to purchase Opera as a replacement for IE, so it probably won't happen. I've played around with IE7 in the Vista Beta CTP and found it has incorporated many of these features already. If MS can clone features from other products without having to purchase the whole company, they're more likely to do that.
"Nice," as in brushed metal theme? I can make Opera/Windows look *exactly* the same as Safari by getting Style XP.
"It's not much/any worse than Windows IE, I guess. Still, it's interface is horrid compared to firefox, camino, safari, shiira, etc so I've never considered using it."
Opera's default interface is exactly the same as every other web browser out there. I don't see what the problem is.
"As for bloated, I don't like having an email client built in, but it doesn't seem to get in the way."
It's less than 4 MB. If you consider that to be bloated, there's a problem ;) Also, Opera starts up faster than IE, renders pages faster, and backs up faster too. Email is turned off by default, and you have to set up an email account through Opera before you'd even know it's there.
"And the skins for Opera don't seem to do much."
You want your browser skin to match the rest of your OS, right? I've currently got my skin set to "Windows Native" so that it looks exactly the same as the rest of my applications. Add in any fancy skins to the OS, and Opera'll look the same as everything else too.
I'm using Windows XP with themes turned off to avoid the fisher price effect. I didn't see anything in the video that's functionally different from Opera: same google search field, RSS reader, and window placement as Opera. It seems to me that your only quibble is how ugly it is, which can be fixed very easily (as I've mentioned... I'm sure that there's a OSX Native skin option in the mac version). If your only complaint is that the UI is ugly, and you haven't tried Opera in a while, it might be worth the whopping 4 MB to do so.
I started using Opera about four years ago and haven't looked back. There are a few sites that simply refuse to work (notably those using intensive Java/Javascript applets), but the number is fewer and fewer every year. Not trying to get you to convert, but it's made my life a great deal simpler (using an uncommon browser means less virus worries, less hostile scripts, etc.; but then again, safari's uncommon too), and it might be worth it to you to give it a shot.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.