An interview with Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner
Published June 22nd, 2006 12:28 AM EDT By Daniel GoldmanYesterday I had a chance to sit down and talk with Jon von Tetzchner, Opera’s founder and CEO.
We discussed many topics over our 45 minutes that we talked. I only have the first 30 minutes of the interview recorded. Jon was so excited about the release of Opera 9, he started talking about it before I even had a chance to hit the ‘record’ button and continued talking with me even after I shut off the voice recorder.
The interview was conducted at a café, so some parts of the recording have a bit of background noise (mostly in the beginning).
We touched on many subjects in the interview, here are some of them:
- We talked a lot about widgets, whether they’re comparable to Firefox’s extensions, why hasn’t Opera included extensions, will Opera include extensions in the future, and whether the lack of extensions in the Opera browser has hurt Opera.
- Looking back what could Opera have done differently which would have resulted to in a bigger market share today.
- We discussed how important market share is for Opera and a realistic goal of Opera’s market share in a couple years.
- Should Opera have removed the ads in the browser earlier? Were the ads a mistake?
- What is Opera doing wrong? And what is Firefox doing right?
- What Opera has learned from Firefox?
- How to deal with sites that don’t work in Opera?
- Why standards are so important for Opera, if many sites don’t even follow them?
- Is Opera satisfied with the progress of Internet Explorer (IE) 7? And what would he tell Bill Gates if he were to meet him?
- We talked about whether the mobile market is more important to Opera than the desktop browser.
- Opera’s market share of the mobile browser.
- The success of Opera Mini and its future growth.
- Untapped markets for Opera.
- Which of Opera’s browsers are most profitable?
- Is Google causing nightmares for Opera when it releases products and services that aren’t compatible with the Opera browser?
- Is Opera worried about a Google browser?
- And much much more.
Thanks to Jon for taking his time to talk with me. I know he had a very busy day, shortly after we spoke he did an hours long radio show and then flew to San Francisco.
I went out to dinner with Jon (and some of the other Opera folks) the night before the event. It was my first time meeting him, and I was very impressed by his focus and true determination to make both websites and browsers standard-compliant.
Jon had some nice words to say about Opera Watch, he even invited me to visit Opera in Norway.
Listen to the interview (mp3 format – 15.9 MB)
Related Articles:
- New downloads record for Opera 9
- Thoughts on Opera’s Opera 9 launch event
- Official Opera 9 launch in Seattle
- Opera is landing in Microsoft’s backyard
- Opera 9 Released
- Opera 9 Review
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Nice questions, Daniel!
I didn’t listen to interview yet…
BTW, I have pretty interesting thing too.
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Terrific questions, Daniel. Thank you.
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Jon comes across with an excellent demeanor, I would like to add. He seems to be a very classy gentleman. I hope that Opera continues to grow and get its footing in market share as it deserves (based on overall quality of software).
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Now that we all have bittorrent, perhaps Opera.com and Opera-related sites will feature more torrent options in order to lighten the server load. Afterall, bittorrent is a superior technology which would lighten up the web, and making an improvement to the web like that would be a good thing.
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Can we get a transcription?
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transcription please
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Can you write it? Lot of noise, my bad English etc.. please.
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A transcript will be nice. Its a bit hard to decipher.
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Please write it! Please please please.
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transcript? summary of *answers*?
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My first thought as well when I saw the link was…
“torrent available?”
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Hey guys, sorry about the transcript. On the plane ride back, I tried to transcribe it, it was too much and to difficult for me to transcribe.
Are there any volunteers out there?
Perhaps next time I should take a video camera with me.
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Great stuff Daniel. Jon is always a great interview. Total class, and really excited about what his company is doing.
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Daniel, please post a separate article as/if you have a written version of the interview (so we don’t miss it), or at least post a brief summary of answers, because the topic list seems pretty interesting
Also, you probably know that general feedback at desktopteam blog is negative. What do you personally think about Opera 9 Final being released too early? Form fonts distortion bug is really a pain…
Thanks.
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Ilya, I’ll see what I can do about the interview. Right now I’m a bit busy to transcribe it, but should I or someone else do it, I’ll put it up as a seperate post.
With regards to the negative comments on the desktop team blog, I’ve seen that myself the other day. I don’t necessarily agree with them on this; no product will ever be released bug-free, and Opera is no exception. There will be an Opera 9.01 version.
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Firefox is on 1.5.0.4, Firefox 1.5 wasn’t bug free and had vulnerabilities.
I think people just don’t know what they want.