This post shall cover the story of the massive success of Opera Mobile (for this article Opera Mobile and Opera Mini will be clubbed together under the umbrella of Opera Mobile), which has now become the most downloaded Java Application in the world.
This is the third part in the the “Ten Years – Ten Products – Ten Million Lessons” series. To start with I would admit, this isn’t the best example which fits in our theme of Tech-Startups, but for the lack of great alternatives in 2000 we shall take the case of Opera Mobile.
First considering the challenges that they faced, the primary fact that comes to mind is to make the user change the default, no matter how great their product is. (Firefox has still just half the number of users as IE)
It must be noted that over here, that the product was actually the USP and not their marketing strategy, things that it offered in terms of technical innovations were:
- It greatly enhanced browsing speeds by fast rendering and server side compression
- It saved user money (i.e. bandwidth)
As we had seen earlier in case of Napster any product “Which saves cash + Enhances Productivity”, a seemingly paradoxical combination, provides a motivation enough for the user to spend the effort in trying it out.
One often overlooked point about opera mobile version is that they offer it across platforms, which effectively meant that when a user switched his phone, no matter what it was, he could still have the convenience of a know user interface. So it effectively meant that a user made the effort to make the change to prevent a change in his habits. A cross platform offering is something which immensely increases your user base in long term, whether your offering is on a desktop or mobile platform.
To further counter the challenge of making users adopt their browser instead of default, they went into massive partnership agreements to offer opera mini bundled by default with the phone.
The company clearly knew their USP (opera even on desktop is by far the most innovative browser, first to introduce tabs, mouse gestures etc) and knew their primary problem, and made a conscious focussed effort to counter the same. Think I missed something, pen it down in the comments below…
Opera sure has the first mover advantage, just like Nokia did with the mobile phones. The only problem with Opera has the first mover advantage did not hold good for very long in the past – remember Netscape.
There is one more alternative to Opera which is fast catching up – BOLT. It had made some serious inroads and is continuing to do so. I just hope Opera doesn’t go the Netscape way and maintains its hegemony in mobile browsers space.
How Bolt to India by storm.
http://www.indianomics.com/2009/05/26/india-takes-bolt-mobile-browser-by-storm/
Very poorly written article. There is hardly any content there…
takes the standards to new lows…
@ramesh: Why so dear? i find the article quite worth it… r u looking for something like 9 out of 10 posts about twitter like TechCrunch does???… save me the pain brother…
@ramesh: You may like to read the previous two articles of the series, it would make the context more apparent. I wanted to avoid the obvious by including which version includes what etc, and make it either look like a change log/wikipedia entry. Anyway, I shall consider your comment for future articles
Its not about the context… its the content that I was talking about… there is no content in this article….
Ramesh – I get your pt. of view (feedback taken in the right spirit). We need to pump in more insights and historical context for articles like these.
One more interesting thing about opera is that if you type “/.” [with quotes] it will take you to slashdot because developers @ opera loves and use /. daily.