Jon von Tetzchner, CEO and co-founder of Opera software, brings to Microsoft competitors in Symbian perhaps their strongest card: a common Web browser. This article, "Microsoft wants your cellphone", is an interesting read if you want to keep up with what competition tries to do to keep their platform together. Here's an interesting idea for you to ponder: what if Microsoft would build Pocket Internet Explorer for the popular Symbian flavors and: a) ask competition not to integrate the browser into their phones or b) ask competition to also bundle Pocket Internet Explorer with their phones c) if a or b are refused, file a suit and team up with the DOJ...
"By most accounts, Microsoft won the Web browser wars over Netscape. But if you ask Jon von Tetzchner how he can be sure that Opera's Web browser is better than Microsoft's, he'll look at you as if you've said something absurd. To von Tetzchner, the so-called browser war is just now heating up, and Microsoft has most certainly not won the contest. If you press him on the issue, he'll concede that Microsoft may enjoy a seemingly indomitable 90-plus percent share of the browser market -- but that's only on desktop computers, where Microsoft has an operating-system monopoly. On cellphones, where Microsoft and Opera will start off on a level playing field, Microsoft will have to compete on the merits of its software. And Opera will win out, von Tetzchner insists."
I actually use Opera to do 95% of my browsing, the rest is done with Mozilla or IE - some sites don't work well with Opera at all. I had it loaded on my Mako when I had that as well, it was pretty neat and full featured. It could even zoom pages. I couldn't enjoy it on that terrible screen though, not to mention I really couldn't spare the memory to keep it on there.
Personally I wouldn't mind if Opera would win the mobile browser war. I use mostly IE on my desktop (sometimes Opera), but Microsoft has showed clearly that they are ignorant concerning the needs of us, mobile users. Why else would Pocket Internet Explorer be such a disaster ? So I chear to the competition, and hopefully Microsoft will learn out of this and will try to make PIE a bit better.
Personally I wouldn't mind if Opera would win the mobile browser war. I use mostly IE on my desktop (sometimes Opera), but Microsoft has showed clearly that they are ignorant concerning the needs of us, mobile users. Why else would Pocket Internet Explorer be such a disaster ? So I chear to the competition, and hopefully Microsoft will learn out of this and will try to make PIE a bit better.
There's a catch with Opera though, it costs money:P On the desktop version you can use it for free though you have to put up with ads - they're not all that bad though. From what I can tell you about Opera on my Epoc machine is that it's extremely full featured, really like using a mini-laptop. I personally believed the hardware wasn't really up to the challenge though - sadly. I've heard bad things about PIE, hopefully PPC 2K3 will rectify this.
Personally I wouldn't mind if Opera would win the mobile browser war. I use mostly IE on my desktop (sometimes Opera), but Microsoft has showed clearly that they are ignorant concerning the needs of us, mobile users. Why else would Pocket Internet Explorer be such a disaster ? So I chear to the competition, and hopefully Microsoft will learn out of this and will try to make PIE a bit better.
Remember when Internet Explorer sucked and Netscape had most of the market? How times have changed, with IE having 90+% now. I stayed using Netscape unless some site didn't work, but now I use Mozilla and love it (the built-in pop-up stopper got me to try it).
Anyway, if Microsoft ever feels threatened, don't think for a minute that they can't improve Pocket IE. In fact, I recall reading that Windows CE .NET will include a version compatible with IE 5.5 (whatever that means :-)).
Jon von Tetzchner, CEO and co-founder of Opera software, brings to Microsoft competitors in Symbian perhaps their strongest card: a common Web browser. ....
Question is when will M$ purchase Thunderhawk......... :wink: This one rocks, but cost to much as an annual fee. Using a special server to prepare the pages for the mobile unit, making pages look better and suck up less of your GPRS MB:s.
I think if you're going to charge for a web browser, a Thunderhawk-like reformatting service is the way to go on wireless devices. Need to get the price down to about $20/year though.
a) ask competition not to integrate the browser into their phones or
b) ask competition to also bundle Pocket Internet Explorer with their phones
c) if a or b are refused, file a suit and team up with the DOJ...
or - none of the above... I know that those points were partly in jest, but... here I go again:
Since no single mobile phone maker has a monopoly on the market, you couldn't really go after them easily. Since Opera clearly doens't have a monopoly anywhere in anything (they're just a tiny thing), I don't think anti-trust laws apply there as well.
Antitrust laws apply to Monopolies, and how they compete. For good or for bad, the laws are designed to prevent a company that *already* owns a market from unfairly preventing others from competing in that market (or form leveraging their monoply to unfairly compete in other markets).
I don't think the laws apply to a group of companies that jointly decide on another vendor's product (I'm not a lawyer, so it's just my 2 cents....)
That is - if Opera themselves had a monopoly on cellphones (or the OS that runs them, I guess), and could therefore dictate what browser was put in, you might have a case. People might argue now that Nokia and the other european makers are an "oligopily", but Motorola is an American company, and doesn't use Symbian (that I know of), and Samsung is Korean, and I haven't seen any of their phones with Symbian either.
So anyway - while I love PPC, and I really like the smartphone, I definitely don't want MSFT to "own" that market - they do their best work when facing stiff competition (remember the leap from CE 2.11 to PPC? That was because of Palm).
von Tetzchner vs Microsoft
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