Choose Opera

We had a talk with Tor Odland the head of Communications at Opera. Check out how he got to work in Opera, his greatest moments and browser stats.

Choose Opera: Hi there Tor! Could you please introduce yourself to the Opera community?

Tor: First, I belong to a quickly declining and heavily victimized minority here at Opera Software: Norwegians. There seems to be some grand scheme to eradicate us from our own company. That said, the third employee ever to join Opera was partially from Zimbabwe, so I guess it was inevitable. And joke aside, I'm thrilled to work at such an international company with more than 50 different nationalities represented. The world is bigger than Norway after all.

Second, I'm the head of Communications at Opera. So I'm supposed to know everything that's going on in order to tell the world how fantastic our vision is and why people should use our products. Let's just say that my job is fun and extremely challenging. I'm blessed with a fantastic PR team, located worldwide, which gives Opera a local voice in most of our major markets.

Third, I'm married to an American and drive a station wagon. We're in the "Double Income - No Kids" (DINK) category. Which is nice, as long as it lasts...

Choose Opera: You've been in Opera for a while. Why and when did you start using Opera and how did you end up here?

Tor: I joined Opera from a consultancy job in London, where I primarily helped Philips (the electronics company) improve their PR work. Philips is probably the opposite to Opera (extremely large, very diverse product portfolio, conservative business culture, etc), so I've learned a lot from simply observing how these organizations develop. One day back in 2004, I received a call from the previous head of Communications at Opera (Pål Hvistendahl). He said "I'm leaving the company in a week, want to come by for an interview?" A week later, I showed up at the Opera reception and I was quickly ushered to a meeting room. Sushi and cakes were on the table and a crowd gathered... I was wondering what on earth was going on... As it turned out, I was taking part in Pål's leaving party. The CEO and other top executives showed up, too. When someone asked who that pale guy in the corner is, Pål responded "he's interviewing for my job." Later that day I ran through several job interviews and subsequently got a job offer.

That was the kind of reception I don't think any other company would dream about giving a job candidate. But that's exactly how Opera is... we're open, inclusive and not so worried about whatever is the right thing to do.

Speaking of which: Back in the 1990s many people wondered if making a browser was the right thing to do, too, given the stiff competition from Mosaic and Netscape. 800 people and nearly a 100 million monthly users later, we can say that it was the right thing to do.

Choose Opera: What's the coolest thing you've experienced working for Opera?

Tor: The coolest thing I've experienced is Opera Mini. It embodies everything that's good about Opera: it's fast, it's small, it runs on any device, it helps the have-nots get online, it's cost-effective and it brings the mobile Web to the masses. Essentially, it democratizes the Web. When we first launched the trial version of Opera back in the fall of 2005, we had no idea how far it could go. Today, it is the most popular mobile Web browser on the planet.

The second coolest thing I've experienced is the implementation of my original vision for how you can enable a truly effective social media strategy in a company like Opera. When we decided to take the My Opera Community site from a basic forum page to a full-fledge networking platform (in 2005), we also realized that we needed to staff this channel with full-time employees. So we went out there to recruit our first Community Manager. His name was Brian Johnson (an American) and he quickly established some things we still believe in today: You need to speak to the community on their terms, you need to involve the rest of the Opera employees and you can't let the lawyers get their way all the time. He was later replaced by Espen Øverdahl, a brilliant young man with just the right attitude and skill set. Today, we have a broad social media team, covering multiple geographies and languages. The team is the embodiment of that early vision of how you can't let any regular PR or marketing person handle social media. You need people who are truly passionate and knowledgable about social media and who have the guts to go out there and represent a public company without losing any sleep over it. Well, they may lose their sleep, but that's because they keep chatting and responding online to community members at any hour of the day.

Choose Opera: Opera's market share is a heated topic for discussion. What's your take on it?

Tor: Market share is always fun to talk about because anyone can have an opinion on it. What makes it even more fun is that stats can be interpreted in so many ways. And on the Web, we're seeing all kinds of opionions and interpretations of the available data.

The primary challenge (one we know that Mozilla shares our perspective on) is that the available data is never 100% representative of the realities out there. The most complicated varieties are the "global browser market share statistics" because they try to represent the behavior of all Internet users, worldwide. Two of the most quoted providers of global market shares are NetApplications and StatCounter. While they have slightly different methodologies, they both lean towards server data from the Western hemispheres of the world.

From a purely educational perspective, it's important to understand that the traffic stats these companies provide are based on the usage of their own analytical software. Most sites out there use analytical tools to understand how many visitors they have, where they come from and more. In other words, if only two Web sites in the world used for example NetApplication's analytical tools, then NetApplication's browser rankings would be based on traffic to these two sites. Luckily, the opposite is true: both companies serve millions of page views every day. However, their stats can only be as good as the distribution - in terms of geography as well as content categories - of their customer base.

What we believe more strongly in at Opera is the data that is limited to one country at a time. While it can be statistically challenging to produce data to represent an entire online population (in for example a large country such as Germany), you're still much better off in your accuracy compared to the global stats.

Choose Opera: How much market share does Opera really have? Does anyone really know?

Tor: Nobody can truly know the exact market share of Opera or any other browser. What we know is that we have more than 40 million monthly unique users of our desktop browser. We estimate that we have approximately 3% of the worldwide market for Internet browsers.

Beyond that, you need to consult the local statistics providers in each country to establish our market share. In some countries, it is above 20% (e.g. Russia), in some around 10% (e.g. Poland) and in others around 2% (for example the United States).

Choose Opera: What are your favorite Opera features?

Tor: My favorite Opera feature has always been Mouse Gestures. Can't live without it. My second favorite feature is Opera Link. Wherever I use Opera, and on whatever device, I always have my bookmarks available. That's fantastic. I am also a heavy user of Opera Dragonfly. I use it to to debug and inspect my JavaScript, CSS and DOM code. I love how I can do remote debugging, for example.

Ok, that last one was a joke. There's a limit to what a PR guy can do.