What has happened?
Thursday, 11. January 2007, 20:01:55
According to the latest ranking.pl stats, the number of Polish Opera users exceeded the magic million. 
But I'm not sure if it's a reason to be happy for Opera Software.
My adventure with Opera started on December 2000, when the ad-sponsored Opera 5.0 was released. It was a very niche browser in Poland then, used by (if I remember well) 0.2% of the Polish Internet users or so. Well, it is still almost unknown in many parts of the world, including the United States. But the Opera popularity was systematically growing in Poland. It reached 1% of users on September 2002, 2% on November 2003. Well - it seemed to be a huge success by then. There was Internet Explorer with almost 97%, Opera with 2% and other browsers having the remaining 1% of users. On September 2005 Opera has gained 6.8% of the Internet users living in Poland. And today? You will never guess - we are still at the very same level. What has happened? Why the Opera popularity growth has stopped a year and a quarter ago? At the time, when Opera gone completely free - no ads, no registration fee. What has happened? Did we reach the critical point, which will never be exceeded? Will the market be shared between Internet Explorer and Firefox, and the remaining little crowd of other browsers, including Opera. Opera, which is often not even mentioned by its name - it's called an Internet Channel, the Web Browser, or something, and only the my.opera.com users know, that Opera is hidden under these nicks.
The point of this post is not worrying about amount of the Polish Opera users (it seems that there are more of us in Poland than in both of the Americas). The point is: what has happened? Firefox is not the answer, since Opera market share used to grow even after Firefox was successfully launched.
To be clear: I'm not concerned about all of this. I'm just curious what the Opera marketing staff would tell about this phenomenon.
But I'm not sure if it's a reason to be happy for Opera Software.
My adventure with Opera started on December 2000, when the ad-sponsored Opera 5.0 was released. It was a very niche browser in Poland then, used by (if I remember well) 0.2% of the Polish Internet users or so. Well, it is still almost unknown in many parts of the world, including the United States. But the Opera popularity was systematically growing in Poland. It reached 1% of users on September 2002, 2% on November 2003. Well - it seemed to be a huge success by then. There was Internet Explorer with almost 97%, Opera with 2% and other browsers having the remaining 1% of users. On September 2005 Opera has gained 6.8% of the Internet users living in Poland. And today? You will never guess - we are still at the very same level. What has happened? Why the Opera popularity growth has stopped a year and a quarter ago? At the time, when Opera gone completely free - no ads, no registration fee. What has happened? Did we reach the critical point, which will never be exceeded? Will the market be shared between Internet Explorer and Firefox, and the remaining little crowd of other browsers, including Opera. Opera, which is often not even mentioned by its name - it's called an Internet Channel, the Web Browser, or something, and only the my.opera.com users know, that Opera is hidden under these nicks.
The point of this post is not worrying about amount of the Polish Opera users (it seems that there are more of us in Poland than in both of the Americas). The point is: what has happened? Firefox is not the answer, since Opera market share used to grow even after Firefox was successfully launched.
To be clear: I'm not concerned about all of this. I'm just curious what the Opera marketing staff would tell about this phenomenon.
WIDGETIZE
ResearchWizard # 12. January 2007, 01:36
Besides that browser statistics should always be handled with (lots of) care - but a lot of them over a longer time could give you a tendency and a general impression.
nunio # 12. January 2007, 17:49
During the working hours.
andol # 12. January 2007, 20:42
ranking.pl stats are quite different than the ones you might already know. They cover so many Polish Web pages, that it's very likely to count every Polish user each week.
Of course there are some limitations and drawbacks of the ranking.pl's methods. The people who do not allow cookies are not counted. And the people who frequently delete their cookies are counted multiple times. Anyway it's a quite a good estimate of the reality.
And no - I will tell it once again - the constant level of relative Opera popularity is not satisfactory. Firefox gains one more piece of this cake each week. Opera was growing here in times when it was an ad-aware or ad-free but paid software. Now it's completely free and gains nothing.
There's simply no marketing here in Poland. The global Opera marketing is also very poor. Only the actual Opera users seem to be targeted (sic!). At least only they hear about Opera's PR actions.
In previous years lots of amateur, but effective, marketing activities were performed by Polish Opera fans. But these fans got just fed up - they tried to do their best, while not getting anything like fulfilling their expectations, putting any focus on localization issues, such as localized official Opera services, and similar. Times of the amateur Web pages making the PR job has gone. The end users are more demanding and need more attention these days.
The end users see Web pages and services of any other software vendors in their own languages. Only Opera resists. Even some Opera Browser built-in features are not localizable! The features which were highlighted by Opera Software when launching some new versions. Let me list voice functions, opera:config (including its help), keyboard and mouse shortcuts configuration window, widgets download page, widgets themselves (they are mostly available in English only), skins download page, and more. But software localization issues are only a part of this story. Marketing and www.opera.com available in the end-user languages are the keys. The latter does not count in case of US market, but does the Opera marketing work there? (I don't mean bloggers and club parties.)