A new year, a new challenge...
Thursday, 15. January 2004, 18:27:16
It's 2004 and while my friends in Oslo are enjoying a steady snowfall, the skies are blue as an MS Windows screen and it's almost 70 degrees here deep in the heart of Texas! 
Christian, my colleague and partner in crime here at the Austin office, is out working his butt off at the CES show in Vegas and early reports claim over 100K registered attendees! Actually, this show has grown quite a bit over the years and is now a major forum for MS to drop all kinds of new fashionable terms and buzzwords on us like "Windows Media Center Extender" and "Windows Media Connects". Geez- watch out for Bill Gates in an appliance near you
Anyway, we here in Austin are focused on some pretty exciting initiatives this year. Our main purpose for starting this office last year was to be closer to the market, our users, partners and customers. I thought I was busy in Oslo working 12-14 hour days! Ladies and gents, we are live and in stereo and working it around the clock here in the states!
Last year was our first year getting established in Austin but also a big year nonetheless. We focused heavily on working with the web authoring industry and companies like Adobe and Macromedia. We were able to secure deals with both of them to embed the Opera rendering engine in their products beating out Netscape/ Mozilla and Safari in the process. That was very important as a first brick to help make Opera more pervasive on the desktop authoring front and give web authors the tools to create pages once to recognized open standards, test it once and publish it for all types of devices and screen sizes. Adobe, especially has some great authoring tools- have any of you tried the new GoLive? It's an awesome achievement and Opera is the preview engine inside!! More to come from Adobe in 2004!
Other things we focused on last year was to strengthen our relationship with Google. Google and Opera have had a very friendly relationship since Fall of 2000 when both companies were in heavy growth modes. Well, Google must be on some serious hormonal supplements because they are the wooly mammoth of the search world and heck, the online advertising world to boot. As you may have seen, we implemented Google Rads (Relevant Ads) in Opera to give users a better ad experience and even tried to make it a helpful tool as well. So far, just about everyone likes the Rads and it just looks and feels better in the product. We see many other possibile initiatives with Google and are working on them earnestly as I write this.
In addition to working with all the Internet, media, software and hardware companies in the US, we aim to increase our market share further in 2004. Netscape's exit from the Browser development arena opens the door for Opera to claim the role of leading cross platform browser alternative to MSIE. Opera stands as the only remaining commercial company actively developing and supporting it's browser. This is both a great opportunity and challenge to convince Netscape and IE users that Opera can be their default browser and offer them so much more than they ever thought browsers could offer. More to come on that later. But in any event, we will spend a great deal of time, finding ways to make Opera more visible and accessible to users looking for a better browser in 2004. Help us guys and gals- we need to tell our friends, families and coworkers about Opera!!
On the device side, we are responsible for convincing network Operators like Verizon, T-mobile and others to partner with Opera and utilize the Opera Platform to power their handsets. This is a challenging job but one that should pay off for us in 2004 as the mobile web starts to grow in the US. We are also getting lots and lots of enquiries from OEM's looking for Opera to port to some of the "other" device OS's like PPC, CE, SP2K, Palm and Brew to name a few. We will try and make some of these deals happen as well and truly make Opera *the logical choice* for any device.
Lots to do and we look forward to a big year in 2004. Oh and we read the forums religiously here in Austin so continue to care and we will continue to listen to you!
All new ideas are welcomed to help Opera continue to develop the best Internet experience available.
Good day!
-Dean
Christian, my colleague and partner in crime here at the Austin office, is out working his butt off at the CES show in Vegas and early reports claim over 100K registered attendees! Actually, this show has grown quite a bit over the years and is now a major forum for MS to drop all kinds of new fashionable terms and buzzwords on us like "Windows Media Center Extender" and "Windows Media Connects". Geez- watch out for Bill Gates in an appliance near you
Anyway, we here in Austin are focused on some pretty exciting initiatives this year. Our main purpose for starting this office last year was to be closer to the market, our users, partners and customers. I thought I was busy in Oslo working 12-14 hour days! Ladies and gents, we are live and in stereo and working it around the clock here in the states!
Last year was our first year getting established in Austin but also a big year nonetheless. We focused heavily on working with the web authoring industry and companies like Adobe and Macromedia. We were able to secure deals with both of them to embed the Opera rendering engine in their products beating out Netscape/ Mozilla and Safari in the process. That was very important as a first brick to help make Opera more pervasive on the desktop authoring front and give web authors the tools to create pages once to recognized open standards, test it once and publish it for all types of devices and screen sizes. Adobe, especially has some great authoring tools- have any of you tried the new GoLive? It's an awesome achievement and Opera is the preview engine inside!!
More to come from Adobe in 2004!Other things we focused on last year was to strengthen our relationship with Google. Google and Opera have had a very friendly relationship since Fall of 2000 when both companies were in heavy growth modes. Well, Google must be on some serious hormonal supplements because they are the wooly mammoth of the search world and heck, the online advertising world to boot. As you may have seen, we implemented Google Rads (Relevant Ads) in Opera to give users a better ad experience and even tried to make it a helpful tool as well. So far, just about everyone likes the Rads and it just looks and feels better in the product. We see many other possibile initiatives with Google and are working on them earnestly as I write this.
In addition to working with all the Internet, media, software and hardware companies in the US, we aim to increase our market share further in 2004. Netscape's exit from the Browser development arena opens the door for Opera to claim the role of leading cross platform browser alternative to MSIE. Opera stands as the only remaining commercial company actively developing and supporting it's browser. This is both a great opportunity and challenge to convince Netscape and IE users that Opera can be their default browser and offer them so much more than they ever thought browsers could offer. More to come on that later. But in any event, we will spend a great deal of time, finding ways to make Opera more visible and accessible to users looking for a better browser in 2004. Help us guys and gals- we need to tell our friends, families and coworkers about Opera!!
On the device side, we are responsible for convincing network Operators like Verizon, T-mobile and others to partner with Opera and utilize the Opera Platform to power their handsets. This is a challenging job but one that should pay off for us in 2004 as the mobile web starts to grow in the US. We are also getting lots and lots of enquiries from OEM's looking for Opera to port to some of the "other" device OS's like PPC, CE, SP2K, Palm and Brew to name a few. We will try and make some of these deals happen as well and truly make Opera *the logical choice* for any device.
Lots to do and we look forward to a big year in 2004. Oh and we read the forums religiously here in Austin so continue to care and we will continue to listen to you!
All new ideas are welcomed to help Opera continue to develop the best Internet experience available.
Good day!
-Dean
WIDGETIZE