And now a post from a previous blog that I abandoned.

“David v. Goliath, Now With Public Relations”

Original post date: September 13, 2009

There are a lot of great sites and pages out there with information on Opera Software, the company most widely known for the Opera browser used on computers, mobile devices and even the Wii and Nintendo DS. That’s all well and good, but boring. On the other hand, Opera’s caustic relationship with Microsoft, and the way both companies handled the conflicts, is fascinating from a public relations perspective.

Conflict 1

What Happened:

Although the software leviathan’s Internet Explorer easily reaches MSN, other browsers–such as Opera, Mozilla and some versions of Netscape–run into trouble…. MSN brings a message from Microsoft saying it has “detected that the browser that you are using will not render MSN.com correctly…. Additionally, you’ll see the most advanced functionality of MSN.com only with the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer or MSN Explorer.” … The page then provides several links for users to download versions of Internet Explorer for Windows, Macintosh and MSN Explorer. (source)

What Microsoft Said:

“All of our development work for the new MSN.com is … W3C standard,” said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for web technologies. “For browsers that we know don’t support those standards or that we can’t insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the” standards. (source)

What Opera Said:

Quite a lot. In an editorial on A List Apart, Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie obliterates Microsoft’s claims by viewing the source code of 63 pages on MSN.com and its related portals, finding that none of those 63 pages was valid W3C standards, and only ten of them even declared a doctype.

Who Was Right:
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