I just got off a 20 minute phone call with Opera CEO Jon Tetzchner, thank you for setting that up Julie Sajnani, and it was refreshing to hear the vision of a company who is battling it out in both the desktop and mobile space, yet realizes that at the end of the day the goal they’re trying to reach is about more than themselves.
The internet will be the platform of the future says Jon, and that we’re already seeing it happen with the growing number of applications that now live in a browser. From personal experience I can tell you that something as simple as Calculator, I still end up going to Google and composing my equation in their search box and hitting enter. He goes on to say that most people run less than 5 native applications on their desktop/laptop machine: the browser, an office application, a chat application, a multimedia app and some still use a dedicated email client.
When I asked about fragmentation, in terms of the sheer number of mobile operating systems and the various J2ME implementations across all the handset manufactures and how that affects their development efforts, he simply responded that everyone deserves to have the full internet in their pocket. It is easier to program for S60, Windows Mobile and UIQ due to their openness and since the devices that run those operating systems typically have more horsepower under the hood they can run the full Opera Mobile browser; However Opera Mini is just as important.
Looking at Opera Mini, it is crucial for owners of the “85-90% of handsets sold that are not smartphones” to have the full internet in their pocket as well according to Jon who carries a Sony Ericsson feature phone. The mobile internet and the full internet are not two separate entities, there is only one internet and everyone should be able to experience it. The Opera Mini roadmap from here on out will concentrate on adding features, yes I asked him for a sneak peak, but he was tight lipped about giving me further details. Opera Mini 4 Beta was my application of the year for 2007 and with the 4.1 Beta out now it is going to be hard for anyone to top that in the coming months, but competition is heating up.
Firefox Mobile and Skyfire are two new players in the mobile browser market, neither of them have really launched, both intended to be available by the end of this year and Jon could not be happier to have them enter the arena. What has happened in the desktop space, with Microsoft taking dominance in the operating system world, has lead to stagnation according to Jon and because more and more players are trying to get a chunk of the mobile browser market it is forcing Opera to be better and more innovative while simultaneously accelerating the maturity of the internet as a platform.
Open standards are what made the internet the success it is now and open standards are important for the future evolution of the internet, Jon could not have stressed this enough. I asked him what he thought about the mobile Rich Internet Application frameworks that are creating another layer of abstraction for developers while at the same time making the operating system underneath increasingly irrelevant. He thinks Adobe with their Flash Lite initiative has been around long enough that developers are familiar and comfortable with it and Microsoft’s Silverlight is just “a distraction,” yet another language to learn. HTML 5 is an open standard that will pave the way for richer websites and services to be created and maintains the view the best platform will continue to be, in Jon’s eyes, the internet.