When Opera Software’s Jon von Tetzchner sailed into Seattle to publicise the Danish company’s latest web browser, he announced the battle with Microsoft was on. But can he really win the war? SCOTT BERMAN reports

Jon von Tetzchner walks into a café in Copenhagen’s trendy Vesterbro quarter. A tall man – he apologises when his knees bump the table – he seems like a serious, young academic or computer programmer, albeit one sporting a fine dark suit instead of the regulation T-shirt and sneakers. His entrances aren’t always so inconspicuous. In June 2006, the Icelandic-born, Norwegian-educated 39-year-old sailed into Seattle in a 30ft boat, climbed ashore and later donned a horned helmet. The “Viking” pulled the stunt just a few kilometres away from Microsoft’s headquarters – to launch his own company Opera Software’s new web browser.

The Opera 9 cross-platform browser enables just about any device with a screen, including pocket PCs, barcode readers, inflight entertainment systems, petrol pumps, shopping carts and your kids’ video games, to be connected to the web. Since 1995, Opera, which went public in 2004, has been a David competing with the Goliath that is Microsoft – or at least with an essential part of the Microsoft package: its ubiquitous Internet Explorer browser.

Von Tetzchner is an unlikely magnate. “I’m not really a business guy. I’ve definitely evolved into one because I have to do my job, and I actually enjoy it,” says the computer scientist-turned-chief executive who, reluctantly perhaps, has become the public face of this industry upstart.

The company and its 360 employees in Norway, Sweden, India, Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul and San Diego put out tightly programmed and hacker-resistant browsers that take the web to myriad devices. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Nintendo and Sharp, among others, have installed Opera on their equipment.

Opera’s cross-device programmes run on limited hardware. For example, Opera 9, the company’s latest browser, rolled out in June 2006, doesn’t require much more computing power than Opera 1, the company’s first browser from the 1990s. Opera Mini – a stripped-down mobile browser released in 2005 – is designed for consumers who cannot get a full-blown browser on their phone. The company’s niche in this embedded device market has been its run around Microsoft and Internet Explorer, which dominates desktops. Opera has just 1%-2% of internet surfers globally, but even this small slice means that 10-15 million people browse regularly with Opera.

The company, which took in about €24.5m in revenue in 2006, has a management team composed of various veterans in IT finance, communications, and open standards, a key IT area described later in this article. Von Tetzchner attributes an expected financial loss for 2006 to bigger-than-anticipated investments on device software development for the wireless home-video game console Nintendo Wii, Opera Mini, and widgets, which are essentially convenience and options software systems. Profits were thin on revenue of €18.4m in 2005, but more revenues will come with more users, says von Tetzchner.

As for short-term losses, “one big contract will fix that”, says Torger Reve, a professor at the Norwegian School of Management. Espen Andersen, another expert at the Norwegian school, says von Tetzchner runs a frugal operation and is seen as a competent manager. He’s also a manager with a brash sense of humour. In May 2005 von Tetzchner vowed to swim across the Atlantic if 1 million users downloaded his company’s new browser within four days. They did. So von Tetzchner swam, for a few strokes at least, in a cold Oslo fjord before turning back.