What makes me wonder is the fact that Opera is so unpopular. It seems that the market share of Opera is about 2%. Thinking about it I came to the conclusion that Opera had bad marketing and a difficult distribution. The product itself is definitely not the problem. Opera is for sure better than Explorer or Safari and it is on a par with Firefox, that is less thoughtfully crafted and has less features than Opera, but is way more extensible.
What are the issues then?
The first thing that comes to mind, is the bad name. An opera is not something very exciting for the group of early adopting internet users.
Therefore the name is not very memorable and does not produce strong emotions. Maybe they should have called it more like "Rock-Concert" or "Madonna". If you compare Opera to its main competitor Firefox, you see how lame the name is.
A second point is the distribution channel. Unlike the Internet Explorer and Safari, Opera is not preinstalled on Computers. This makes the first point even more important, because people can not install software that they can not remember. By the way, being not preinstalled too makes the success of Firefox even more striking.
Another problem is that Opera has no core customer base. For Firefox are these (Web) developers and Open-Source advocates. For Safari are these all the Apple fans, that think Apple can not do wrong. Maybe Apple should charge more money for Safari :).
What can Opera Software do about it?
To gain a bigger market share on the desktop computer Opera Software needs to find its niche. At the moment it seems that Opera is focusing on the mobile browser market. Indeed they are very successful there. A strategy could be that people who love the mobile version of Opera use the desktop version to use the syncronising features that Opera offers. In my opinion this strategy in very dangerous, because I personally think it is more likely people will change to the mobile version of their actual desktop browser if a decent mobile version is available or stick to the preinstalled browser.
Whatever the future will hold for Opera, I hope that this very nice Web browser will be available for download in the future. Otherwise my experience on the web would be much lesser.
2 comments:
opera was a paid software before 2000 as far as i remember and at that time the only option was internet explorer or netscape. then came the firefox i used it for 6-7 solid years then i came to know that opera is free so i download it and initially i was not satisfired with it but after some tweaking it became the no 1 fast and sixy browser for me ... after 2006-7 i have never looked back at firefox even i have it and i regularly update and tweak it but i hardly use it once or twice a month just for the sake of my long long freindship with it. the reason is that firefox is missing so many extremely basic features that every casul reader needs for "effective and sixy (se*y) browsing" are either TOTALY missing are are extremely hidden behind... there is not past and go button in either address bar/search bar. u cant create a search from any site. scroollling is shit on firefox and IE. .... i cant list all the big big problems with those bloated softwares. opera on the other hand has all the things right out of the box. u do not need to download addons for so basic tasks in opera they are builtin by defualut. morover opera is extremely flexibile and tweakable. u can place icons at the status barrs . this cant be done directly in firefox even i hav'nt found and addon for that purpose which sholud be at least close to what is by defayult in pera...
so basic reason for opera being unpopular is the fact the initially it was a paid software and hennce it did not see any wide market acceptance. also there is a huge STIGMA associated with closed end softwares... and butter and honey with open source .. speaking frankly open source (particlryl firefox ... OR UBUNTU) are just shit covered with something looking like buttor or honey ... in reality they are withount any dout SHIT.. Opera Rulez...
oh i forgot to mention that my univ friends used by default ie. i introduced them to firefox and the were very happy with it and after a month the were almost addicted to ff. but when i introduced them to opera ..the other day firefox was missing from there coputers. oh what a poor thing it is.... look how people react to ff and Opera.
wish us best of luck happy browsing
opera RulZ. opera the King of browsers in reality check.,
Yeah the old revenue model was a problem for sure.
Featurewise is out of the box Opera is unbeatable.
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