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| Rumour: Facebook looking to acquire Opera |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-05-25 19:09:44 |
| Pocket-lint has a rumour up that Facebook is interested in acquiring Opera to kickstart their own move into the browser market, to compete with Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft. While it would mean much-deserved recognition for Opera, I actually hope such a deal does not go through - for entirely selfish reasons. |
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| I dunno |
| By WorknMan on 2012-05-25 19:25:04 |
| I think they would have to dumb Opera down significantly to appease the Facebook crowd. Seems like they would go for something simpler than that. |
 - Score: 6 |
| What would happen to Opera Mini? |
| By Morgan on 2012-05-25 19:27:03 |
|
Opera Mobile/Mini is the only alternative to Pocket IE I have on the ancient WinCE based barcode scanners I'm responsible for maintaining at my part time job. If Facebook buys Opera, and does away with the gateway that allows the mobile apps to function, our company will have to spend several thousand dollars for new hardware to maintain compatibility with the database we use. That's money that is not in the budget, and while it ensures job security for me, it's not an ideal situation by far. Please understand that I'm not saying Facebook should drop interest because of its potential impact on one little online sales company, I'm simply offering an anecdote about the impact such decisions have at this level. In fact, I'd love for my company to be able to upgrade us to the latest hardware; it would certainly make my job easier in the long run. I just find it sad that a corporate buyout by a company that has nothing to do with our business could affect us so greatly. But, that's the way the business world works every day. |
| - Score: 2 |
| I do not think they will buy it |
| By churlish_Helmut on 2012-05-25 19:27:16 |
|
Well, if they buy it, it would be some sort of smart move, after buying instragram for the money of 10 Third-world-countries. I mean, i wouldn't use opera anymore, if the O becomes blue and i can instantly have access to my FB-account than to my email accounts. Pretty useless for me, unless they intend to do their mobile OS |
| - Score: 4 |
| Opera gets most of their money from Google, too... |
| By bhtooefr on 2012-05-25 19:40:45 |
| ...at least that's what was said as the reason why Opera was able to disable ads on the desktop version. |
| - Score: 2 |
| Comment by Luminair |
| By Luminair on 2012-05-25 19:41:07 |
|
opera for windows pared down into a browser compatible with facebook ideals would no longer be opera. hopefully they realize that and would fork it into two different browsers with different purposes. opera for android, however, is already compatible with facebook ideals |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: What would happen to Opera Mini? |
| By foldingstock on 2012-05-25 19:46:19 |
|
> I just find it sad that a corporate buyout by a company that has nothing to do with our business could affect us so greatly. But, that's the way the business world works every day. I don't mean for this to sound rude, but the "sad" outcome you speak of is always a possibility when you depend on any external entity to conduct business. Free services such as Opera's mobile browser are great, but should be used with caution and some kind of contingency plan in place. Personally, I expect to see a lot more of this in a few years. Companies are increasingly pushing internal services to "the cloud" to free up their staff and save operational costs. This is great short term, but most companies aren't prepared for the possibility that their cloud service will shut down one day. Services don't even have to shut down to drastically effect business operations. Simply changing a public API or web interface layout could result in broken functionality. Ah, the cloud. |
| - Score: 6 |
| RE: What would happen to Opera Mini? |
| By pgquiles on 2012-05-25 19:56:47 |
| There are alternatives: NetFront, ZetaKey, UC Browser, Konqueror Embedded, and probably more. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[2]: What would happen to Opera Mini? |
| By Morgan on 2012-05-25 20:03:19 |
|
Not rude at all, I agree with you completely. I knew what I had thrown together was a kludge, and would eventually be replaced with a more robust answer. In fact, I do have a long term solution mapped out via OpenBravo's ERP offering. But it will still involve a significant hardware upgrade, something my superiors will just have to deal with when the time comes. My point was more that, increasingly, big decisions by the major players no longer trickle downhill to the little guys. Rather, they become an avalanche of change that is difficult to deal with unless, as you said, there is a contingency plan. I have a feeling that even if we had licensed a specific level of support and customization from Opera for our warehouse database project, a move like the one rumored would still impact it significantly. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[2]: What would happen to Opera Mini? |
| By Morgan on 2012-05-25 20:06:18 |
| Actually I have tried a few alternatives, including NetFront, and none will work on the very specific hardware we have. I'm exploring other hardware solutions at this point, but so far it looks like a complete upgrade to WinMo6 based scanners, unless I can find an Android based alternative that is as rugged as what we use now (DataLogic Kyman scanners). |
| - Score: 2 |
| Something unique to Opera |
| By foldingstock on 2012-05-25 20:06:54 |
| It doesn't make sense to purchase Opera when there are dozens of open source browsers that could easily be forked and rebranded, assuming that FaceBook just wants to enter the browser market, of course. With this in mind, it seems to me that there is something specific about Opera (mobile? unite? one of the plethora of add-in features?) that FaceBook wants which other browser's do not (entirely or easily) offer. |
| - Score: 2 |
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