Opera Otaku

On Thursday, I wrote a fairly lengthy post on the Open the Web and Take Action forum in response to a post by Hildanknight, an active member of the Opera community.

For those people who might be interested (and don't read the forums) here's what I wrote:

Hildanknight: Thanks for your kind words.

Without getting drawn into debating the meaning of our marketshare percentage, and whether or not certain numbers constitute a "failure", I want to say that Hildanknight brings up some important points that I'd like to address. It's absolutely true that we at Opera need to ramp up our marketing activities, and we are certainly in the process of doing so, but it's also true that we haven't been sitting on our hands either.

That said, we obviously need to communicate better with our users (especially our most committed fans) what we've been doing. There are many reasons why this communication has been difficult, not the least of which is that we are so busy doing other stuff (whether it's engineering-related or marketing-related). For myself, I take the Opera community very seriously, but I've had so much other work in recent weeks (such as representing Opera at various industry events) that I could only check in here briefly. Needless to say, I'm glad to be back. To help ease the load on myself, I will definitely encourage my other colleagues to read and write on the forums more. (Some already do, of course, but many others don't).

Yes, we need to spread the word about Opera (through big campaigns and one-on-one interactions) more than ever, as there's more Opera goodness to talk about than ever before! Should Opera take a break on developing new features? I really don't think that's desirable, considering that other browsers are only going to get better over time, there's a lot of things (beyond bugs) that we need to change, new web technologies and services are always emerging that Opera has to work well on, and simply the fact that we pride ourselves on being an innovative company. If being innovative is one thing we mention in our marketing, it doesn't make sense for us to stop innovating.

We do a lot of marketing stuff (that I'll talk more about later), but I agree that we don't engage our fans enough in terms of helping you help us, and that's something we (including myself, personally) are working on. With the recent hiring of myself and Daniel Goldman (of Opera Watch--both of us long-time Opera fans before we started working for Opera--I hope we can work together to better meet your needs (as passionate Opera fans) in the immediate future.

I wish I could tell you all some of the great stuff we're working on, but the tendency at Opera is that we don't announce stuff until it's available to the public (at least in beta form), whether it's new browser features or marketing campaigns. Know, however, that we take all of your feedback seriously and we're working hard to improve communications between all of you and Opera Software.

PS: johnnysaucepn, yes Opera on Desktop is very important to us for all the reasons you mention and more, so marketing our desktop browser is still a big priority. What's becoming increasingly important, however, is that we are providing a robust and unified browsing experience across many platforms, with desktop being one of those platforms and the most familiar to a lot of people.

http://my.opera.com/community/forums/findpost.pl?id=1840584