First of all, this will become a pretty boring and random post! 😉
I used Opera for many years, and while I wasn’t really an active or important contributor to the MyOpera Community, I frequently visited it, used MyOpera Mail as my main mail address and could never get enough of reading all those interesting blogs from other users of the community. It was a really sad day when Opera ASA announced to shut down MyOpera, since it was the heart and soul of the browser and the company. In my opinion MyOpera wasn’t meant to be a competition for Facebook and others, it was is own an unique place for those who chose it for what it was. It’s great that Vivaldi.net picks up that spirit and allows it to live on.
In my opinion, previously Opera and from now on Vivaldi isn’t about making the browser with the biggest marketshare. It’s about their users, serving what they expect from a good browser that satisfies their needs. In the past Opera always had a small marketshare compared to the big players on the market, like Internet Explorer, Firefox and currently Chrome. Their unique strength had been the most loyal userbase they had worked for pretty hard, users who wouldn’t leave a product for the next best thing they could find. Just look how Chrome managed to overtake Firefox in such a relatively short period of time.
If you involve your users and allow them to be part of your product, show them that you really care about them, they won’t just leave you the day they see something that looks slightly better, they stay and try to help to improve “their” browser even further. I hope that Vivaldi won’t let us down 🙂
