Founded in 1994, Opera Software can justifiably argue that it is the oldest browser company in the world. Its vision is to provide a Web experience on any device. Why should we care? According to Jon S von Tetzchner, Opera’s co-founder and CEO (and contributor to IP Leaders), only 12% of phones are Apple iPhones, leaving a huge market for open source operating system Android to reach high- and low-end phones: “There will be around two billion desktop PC users in 2011, but the majority of the population doesn’t have one, so a viable alternative platform that can deliver the Web is mobile.”
Beyond the desktop and mobile, there are a host of devices such as in-flight entertainment consoles, wall pads, set-top boxes and tv games consoles that can offer the Web as the platform of choice: “Despite experiments such as WAP, there is only one World Wide Web,” says von Tetzchner.
He points out that few people use more than five applications on their PC – a browser, Office, IM, a graphical tool and perhaps one other more rarefied tool. Everything else is Web-based and most time in front of a PC is spent with a browser because it makes sense: “The browser is the glue for activities from making calls to watching films. Today, there is no real difference between a Web site and an application.”
“The Web is the biggest open source community in the world,” says von Tetzchner: develop and test on a PC, for instance, and deploy across many platforms. It is fast and free compared with the cost and installation of a Windows-based application. Moreover, he adds, it is not just applicable to the desktop and mobile, but a “complete widget ecosystem”. Widgets will manage processes such as chatting on Facebook when you want to continue on a different device without having to close one application and open another.
“Our goal,” he concludes, “is convergence without compromise.”
