Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Sorry it just slipped.
If not, that'll cut their usage share by half.
*yawn* I'm sure the 10 Opera users will be mighty upset over this while the other 99.9% of the browser users will yawn from lack of caring.
The five people who use Opera are going to be so sad.
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Okay, I actually read the article and the press release, and I'm still at a loss as to what he means by "quarterly focused". Is he complaining about a lack of big picture focus, or is he just hoping that throwing enough buzz-words will confuse people into leaving him alone?
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.
I am officially gone from
Always a scrappy underdog. Provides a lot of out of the box capabilities in a small install. Sorry homeboy decided to quit. Looks like he's srs bsns.
Has JoeMonco weighed in on this at all? I can't form an opinion without help from JoeMonco.
I think the board will find that monetizing a great product in an environment of free mediocre and/or good equivalent products is still a failing business model.
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.
I've been using Opera since before it was free, since I feel it provides the most in terms of features and performance. Every update seems to get better and faster while maintaining a low footprint. I don't know how they keep adding features without it becoming a bloated mess, but they manage to. It's sad they don't have more market share.
IE is only used by corporates / retards/ chinese users and Microsoft is virusing them out.
Firefox bloated itself to death on memory crashing even 12GB RAM systems.
Only ipad and macfags use Safari and can't visit most site because of lol flash.
Opera is too hipster for hipsters and doesn't work with most sites due to its market share being less than Linux.
Everyone will be using Chrome soon, uploading all their data to chromes botnet so Google can sell ads everywhere.
Why doesn't von Tetzchner just fork the source and create a new project? Oh right, Opera is closed source. Pity.
Basically you are correct. However, you're overlooking that companies have to rely on funding from outside sources in order to manage their cash flow. This means creditors, and creditors are all intensely fixated on quarterly financial targets due to the covenants they have in place with their lendees. They don't care about competition leap-frogging, they care about whether or not the company can hit their EBITDA targets, as well as payments on capital, senior, and other kinds of debt. A company has to take this into account, especially if they want to manage their cashflow and be able to pay their employees plus their rent and everything else. It's a lofty goal to focus on strategic long-term objectives, but that has to be balanced by quarterly financial obligations, or else something important is going to be shafted.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
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.
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.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Let that be a lesson slash heads Profits are evil, yes it's confirmation for all you socialists here.
There was an article a while back which claimed that Opera can become the new Google if they wish almost overnight. Their secret weapon is Opera Mini and all the traffic and searches that go through their servers.
"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
It would've been nice if they kept the early form-factor of Opera, and simply integrated a cross-over layer to use other webbrowser Add-ons & Plug-ins, because the quality of others was in the OPEN development process. Opera was first to integrate handling of Bittorrent downloads into it's browser, and that was fine but the lack of interactive control to a PEER network was ridiculous.
Still have Opera 7 on a Windows 9x/ME system, right next to another browser known as OffByOne, and OPERA for it's size even outperforms the other small formfactor browsers in many instances. Something tells me that this was the vision of the founder, because all the versions of Opera after 7 simply started trying to look pretty rather than be functional.
Opera has always been the fastest and most stable and most uniform browser for me. It's the number-1 standard for actually DOCUMENT-READING pages while other browsers were just for finding the next URL href in the page to go to the next. Opera in all practicallity is the equivalent of an eBook reader for pdf, but only for HTML: it's better than the rest.
operatic
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I mean, what could one really expect from Opera if not Drama?
The Humblest Mollusk on the Net
"more quarterly focused than I"
Too bad, Opera is the last browser where flash gaming still works.
Chrome and Firefox both implemented on top of the new flash local shared objects API wrongly, by putting them in the same category as cookies, making it impossible to manage them differently. Good bye saved games.
So sticking with Opera while it still works.
Opera just lost a loyal user. I've been an opera user since version 4 (circa 2000). The last few years, Opera has gone to the dogs. It has progressively become buggier and buggier and slower and slower and clunkier and clunkier since version 9xx. And the latest version is just a piece of sh!t. It lost my bookmarks and sessions. I also periodically lose all my speed-dials (no rhyme of reason that I can see). The browser crashes a few times a day.
Such a shame... Sorry Jon has to go but it's just as well. I'm sure there are bigger and better things in store for him. He had a great vision (user-focused) but I guess the board just failed to see it his way. Tsk, tsk, a real shame.