Originally posted by kamial:
i thing its a very simple answer, they are focused all manpower on analyzing "user data" and sell than. ...
Well... generally speaking, many (most?) of the mods are volunteers, not Opera employees. So they aren't being focused on anything else Opera ASA might be doing as a business effort. Actually, if I were a stockholder (I'm not) with my money making it all possible, I'd probably want to see Opera branching out into a variety of business ventures... as long as it all revolved around Opera's core strengths. As a browser user, most of us certainly might rather want to see Opera pouring resources into browser design instead - but we don't really have a financial oar in the water, so we have little say - justifiably.
A business, seeking to please those investors who are risking their money in the venture, adds employees in market areas into which it wants to expand its capacity or begin/increase market penetration... and those are usually not employees who might be interchangeable with employees in an existing technical specialty area. They have different training and skills. A business evaluates the potential market and apportions its limited expansion capital in the direction it feels most likely to produce the greatest return. The simple reality is that developing a free desktop web browser in a highly-competitive marketplace of other free browsers requires an expensive level of employee support. A "free" browser earns its revenue for the owning company through marketing preferred ad or search-engine placements in the browser (or, rarely, by rental of the custom browser-engine code to other companies). Put another way, Opera probably has decided it will make its stockholders more money by more aggressively pursuing advertising tie-ins with its browsers (especially mobile) than it will by staffing up browser development to add various "features".
There's a harsh "life" reality that many users forget in all their debates and criticisms over new free web browsers: somebody has to pay the bill to create the browser. It's certainly not the user paying directly, in the sense of a purchase price or a rental fee. But it is the user "paying" indirectly, by selling his click choices (and perhaps associated marketing data if the thing/site clicked creates that) that generates royalty payments back to the browser maker from the owner of the thing/site clicked. One may not like that "model", but it is the model used by virtually every browser out there that has a marketing share above 1/10 of one percent. There have been, and always probably will be, individuals who develop software altruistically as genuine "freeware" and gift it to the world. But developing a full-fledged browser and keeping it safe, up-to-date with evolving web standards, and supporting it once it's out in the hands of users is not a task for the faint-of-heart, those with extremely limited resources, or those in it just for the short term.
