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

So, will he continue to use Opera?

[Anonymous Coward]

If not, that'll cut their usage share by half.

Ouch

[Hatta]

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.

Re:Ouch

[man_of_mr_e]

Really? I downloaded Opera Mini for my Android at no cost. Did the same on my ancient Windows Mobile. How exactly are they charging for those?

Re:Ouch

[Hatta]

No, that means focusing on the short term alone is likely to be bad for the long term.

Re:Ouch

[Teun]

Stupid question.

No of course the man is not opposed to making a profit, quite the contrary.

The man is against short term and short sighted policies, he prefers to have a future horizon that's more than 13 weeks ahead.BR> A perfectly sensible thing to do.

Re:Ouch

[sconeu]

What makes you think anyone is going to focus on the short term alone?

How about this?

I feel the Board and Management is more quarterly focused than me

Re:Sad news

[Nerdfest]

After the remaining board members "monetize" it, (my guess as to their intentions), I think your estimate will be quite accurate.

No surprises here

[dkleinsc]

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.

Re:No surprises here

[im_thatoneguy]

Yes and No. I've beaten my head against developers who see their code as sacred and are unwilling to put it in the hands of users.

That obsession with perfection can often prevent "good enough" software from being put to good use "before it's ready". And then I often find that the developers are working in too much isolation and lose the incredibly valuable feedback from being used 'in the wild'.

Re:No surprises here

[ArsonSmith]

"...profit at all costs."

You know that's an oxymoron right?

Re:No surprises here

[Artagel]

You do know that the investment made in companies uses money, right? And the people who gave the money, actually value the money? I mean, sure, it must be fun to burn other people's money. But don't act surprised when they object.

Re:No surprises here

[dkleinsc]

It's actually not panicky investors, but investors who can very easily move their cash to greener pastures.

Imagine a world with 2 investment possibilities: Company A is growing at a steady 5% and is likely to continue that easily over the next 5 years. Company B is growing at a very unstable 15%, and is likely to blow up in about 6 months. Our rational investor will want to invest in company B for the next 5 months, then go back and move their money into company A. If the investor moves his cash, it's quite possible company A won't be around when company B blows up. But if the investor doesn't move his cash, then company A will still collapse because all the other rational investors came to the same conclusion about the correct strategy. That means moving the capital from B to A is a completely rational, yet destructive, decision.

The management at both companies knows this. So the management at company A will try to look like company B to investors. Meanwhile, the management at company B will try to cash in on the investor activity, make a bundle, and quit before moving on to found another unstable company C.

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).

Hard to compete with free..

[SuperCharlie]

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.

Fastmail

[willoughby]

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.

Opera is my favorite browser

[Missing.Matter]

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.

Fork'd

[cratermoon]

Why doesn't von Tetzchner just fork the source and create a new project? Oh right, Opera is closed source. Pity.

Re:Fork'd

[cratermoon]

Never ask a geek, 'why?', even if put in a wordy way like 'what's the point?'. Just nod your head and back away slowly.

Opera is going the wrong way

[Tridus]

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.

Re:Opera is going the wrong way

[afidel]

IMHO they make the best mobile browser out there, and since almost all the carriers are now going with draconian data plans it makes tons of sense to use their compression and resizing model. I was never a fan of their desktop browser, but I'm glad they were there as most of the other players stole some of their best ideas and incorporated them into browsers that fit my style better.

Re:Opera is going the wrong way

[MonsterTrimble]

Then a web server built into the browser.

I'll get flamed for this but I love the web server that is built in. I use it instead of throwing stuff up to websites like senduit and the like. SO much easier and cleaner from my end. I haven't really worked on the photo sharing piece of unite yet however. That's something else too. Granted, their E-mail and torrent program is shite but their RSS feeder is the best I've used by miles and miles. Nobody has come close.

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.

Re:Opera is going the wrong way

[Tridus]

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.

Opera 3 had rudimentary support, at best. Considerable effort was spent in creating M2 (the mail client in later versions) after the fact when they should have been focusing on the browser.

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

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.

Not in my experience. Opera lost most of its performance advantage several versions ago. They've probably regained some of it recently compared to Firefox because FF 4 is such a pig, but that's hardly a credit to them and more of a condemnation of Mozilla.

Such as?

Couple of the many that annoyed me:

In early versions if you closed the browser with multiple windows open, reopening the browser later would reload those windows from the server. They changed that later so that it would reload the cached versions, completely ignoring cache settings and bringing up stuff that could be *days* since expired. When I stopped using it, it was still doing that. Firefox does the same thing.

They also changed from the nice windowing model Opera 6 had to a less functional tab style version around Opera 9 (or maybe 10) where you couldn't layer things around inside the same window anymore, instead you had to split the tab off into its own window and then do it. Hell, Opera 3's MDI was more capable of that.

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.

The BitTorrent client was built before it was ignored, which was attention spent on something that was never needed. And really, ignoring stuff that needs work is the Opera way in some things. They had a great custom search functionality years before anybody else, but had no UI to edit it and sent people off to edit ini files instead. That's certainly fine in the first version it appears, but they left it that way for years to play around with other stuff instead.

Mail was there in some form in Opera 3, then totally redone in later versions, then ignored for a while.

It is clear that you have no idea what you are talking about.

Really? You're the one telling me the same mail client has been there all along when it really wasn't. They called it "M2" for a reason, and it wasn't because it was the first version.

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.

Unite is a web server stuck inside a web browser. It'd make more sense as a standalone app so that people could A) not install it, and B) keep it running after closing the browser. (Maybe they fixed B since I stopped using Opera, the first time they didn't fix windowing issues and instead announced a web server I decided I was done with them.)

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./quote?

Jon was the CEO until last year. Have you EVER heard a CEO go on an interview and say "yeah we're doing this shit all wrong"?

Short term vs long term.

[bmo]

"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

you might describe this development as

[circletimessquare]

operatic

Should have seen it coming

[TheGreatGraySkwid]

I mean, what could one really expect from Opera if not Drama?