Opera’s CEO will swim from Norway to the USA

Opera’s CEO will swim from Norway to the USA

An overly excited Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software, today proclaimed at an internal company meeting that if the download numbers of the new Opera 8 Web browser reach 1 million within the first four days of the launch, he will swim from Norway to the USA with only one stop-over for a cup of hot chocolate at his mother’s house in his home country, Iceland. Opera’s communications department could obviously not resist to make such a bold and inarguably over-confident statement public.

Opera’s new Web browser, Opera 8, was released Tuesday, and the massive response had Opera’s download servers kneeling an hour after the launch. Still, the download numbers of Opera 8 reached 600 000 in the first 48 hours.

“A lot of people had great difficulties downloading Opera 8 on Tuesday because the traffic on the servers was simply too high,” says Carsten Fischer, VP Desktop, Opera Software. “When download numbers reached 120 per second one hour after the release, our servers had serious problems dealing with all the requests. We had prepared for heavy traffic, but this exceeded our wildest dreams.”

Opera has now installed additional servers with increased capacity, and it was the download counter showing 600 000 downloads in 48 hours that sparked Mr Tetzschner’s enthusiasm and thus his courageous promise to boldly swim where no man has swum before.

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