Staging Opera
Spotlight: Jon von Tetzchner
OSLO--On a blustery day in April, 37-year-old Jon von Tetzchner walked out of his gray, anonymous office building and jumped into the icy fiord a few yards away. In a semihumorous act to draw attention to his company, Opera Software, which is Microsoft's longest-surviving independent competitor in the browser wars, von Tetzchner took a few strokes west to fulfill a vow to swim to America. But, since swimming in 48-degree water can quickly be fatal, he soon turned and dunked the public relations staffer who thought up the idea. They both made it back to the rocky Norwegian shore and celebrated their survival.
It would be easy to dismiss the cheesy publicity stunt except for one thing: Opera's survival is also a remarkable achievement. Opera has managed to maintain its independence and even achieve spotty profitability despite aggressive tactics by Microsoft that have humbled bigger competitors such as Netscape. What's more, the security bugs that have plagued Microsoft's Internet Explorer and the growing interest in Internet-enabled cellphones have given Opera's lean and hacker-resistant browser--currently used by no more than 2 percent of the world's Internet surfers--an opportunity to break out of obscurity.
"Opera's ability to survive, and even thrive, is pretty impressive," says Michael Gartenberg, vice president of JupiterResearch, a consulting company. "Some of the stuff Opera has done is amazing--particularly their rendering of Web pages on mobile phones. That is where they have some real opportunities." That success has made von Tetzchner, cofounder and CEO of the 230-worker company, something of a rising star. The Iceland native (he went to Norway for college and stayed for a research job at the Norwegian phone company Telenor) was one of just 120 who attended the World Economic Forum's first "Young Global Leaders" conference in June.
Counterattack. But to turn the old aphorism around, where there is opportunity, there is also danger. The Microsoft missteps that have given Opera a new chance have also brought in other competitors. Netscape, now a division of Time Warner, released a new version of its browser in May. The nonprofit Mozilla Foundation launched a free, open-source browser, Firefox, to much acclaim in 2004 and has grabbed an estimated 7 percent of the market. Apple started loading new Macintoshes with Safari, its own browser, in 2003. And Microsoft itself, which has seen Internet Explorer's share of the market drop from more than 95 percent to 89 percent in the past 12 months, is readying a new version of IE for general release next year.
At least publicly, von Tetzchner and his fellow Operatics express few concerns about the growing competition. When he and fellow techie Geir Ivarsoey took a leave from Telenor in 1994 to create a competitor to Mosaic, the very first browser, "we negotiated the right to come back to work because no one was expecting us to survive 12 months," von Tetzchner recalls. "People said, 'You can't compete with Mosaic.' After Mosaic, people said, 'How can you compete with Netscape?' Then Microsoft. Now they say: 'How are you going to compete with Mozilla?' " Mozilla offers a cost- and ad-free browser because its programmers are volunteers who tinker with its publicly available, or "open source," code. Mozilla complicated the competition last week by forming a for-profit subsidiary to develop and sell its software.
But Opera has won a small but loyal following by pioneering features that, for example, allow surfers to easily open lots of different Web pages and let users subscribe to news services that deliver stories on selected topics directly to their computer. Microsoft's next version of Internet Explorer, a beta version of which was released to selected programmers July 27, will offer both features.
More important, Opera is so tightly programmed (just 5 megabytes, less than half IE's size) and packed with so many security features that many experts say it is the safest of all the browsers. Early this month, Secunia.com, which monitors software vulnerabilities, said Microsoft had 20 unpatched software glitches in Internet Explorer that a criminal could exploit to mine or damage a user's computer. Mozilla's Firefox had three problems waiting for patches. Opera had none. PC World magazine named Opera the best browser of 2004.
But the estimated 3 million computer users who are now downloading its free browser each month often face some unpleasant surprises. If they want an ad-free version, they have to pay $39. And Opera can't easily process a few important sites that deal with E-commerce, downloading software, and making travel plans.
Von Tetzchner charges that some of Opera's problems are a result of malicious programming by Microsoft. He contends, for example, that in 2003 Microsoft programmed a broken link to appear when Opera users clicked on some MSN sites. Microsoft, which in 2000 was ruled to have violated antitrust laws by attempting to monopolize the browser industry, says that such problems are not intentional but simply a result of programmers shunning changes for a browser with such a small market share.
Ringing up profits. To escape that vicious cycle, Opera staffers have been shifting their energies to products that Microsoft doesn't yet dominate: entertainment appliances and cellphones. Already, several major manufacturers, including Nokia, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson, have bought a smaller version of the Opera browser for some of their cellphones. The firm now gets two thirds of its revenue from cellphone makers and other noncomputer companies. Opera reported a profit of $9.3 million on revenues of $28.5 million last year, up from a minuscule profit in 2003.
But the fat lady isn't singing a happy finale for Opera yet. Its hopes of dominating mobile browsing were dealt a setback in June when Nokia said it would switch many of its phones to an open-source browser next year.
Von Tetzchner says Opera will persevere--in its own way. He'll keep its headquarters in Oslo, far from Silicon Valley buzzmakers, and won't even put a sign on the office building. He hopes Opera's software will be enough to gain the world's attention. Of course, if that doesn't work, von Tetzchner can always jump in the fiord again.
This story appears in the August 15, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.