Opera Founder Jon S. von Tetzchner Resigns

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.'"

Comments

Re:Quarterly Focused?

[firellama]

Quarterly Focused means that they are looking to hit their quarterly financial targets rather than the strategic long-term objectives. Companies that do this tend to be loved by analysts, but encounter difficulties when competition leaps ahead (usually by investing in R&D or technological breakthroughs).

Re:Opera is going the wrong way

[hkmwbz]

The company at the time was focused on making a good browser for power users

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.

It also helped that back then they were focused on performance and working on older systems.

Good thing Opera is currently one of the fastest browsers, and still runs on slow hardware, them.

Opera got bigger, and slower.

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.

UI stuff that worked forever was broken in favor of a less flexible Firefox clone model.

Such as?

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.

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.

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.

Once again you are getting it completely wrong. Opera has always been doing more than just browser.

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.

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.