Von Tetzchner first arrived in Oslo in the late 1980s to study, taking his master’s degree in computer science at the University of Oslo, where he also dabbled in business management. He and his company’s co-founder, the late Geir Ivarsøy, who succumbed to cancer in March 2006, spent 1991 to 1995 as part of a research group at Telenor, Norway’s state-owned phone company. The group set up one of Norway’s first web servers, which was also one of the first 100 in the world. Telenor eventually killed the project, but the two young men were granted the rights to the related software that had been developed.

In 1995 von Tetzchner, then 28, and Ivarsøy started Opera with about €6,000 in cash. The company offered its first browser a year later. Today, von Tetzchner’s estimated personal net worth is €12m, and he owns a controlling interest in a holding company that holds Opera shares worth about €31m. His fortune has not led to particularly conspicuous consumption: von Tetzchner and his wife, Marit, shuttle their three children around Oslo, where the family resides, in an ageing minivan.

About 66% of Opera’s revenue comes from the embedded device and mobile phone markets; 33% comes from the desktop market. Opera originally brought in revenue by charging €22 for its browser, and from text and banner advertising; both practices ended in 2005. Today, license-fee payments for the use of its software are Opera’s biggest source of revenue. The next-largest revenue stream comes from development fees earned consulting with companies preparing to include the software on their equipment. Then there’s search revenue. That is, Opera gets a small, undisclosed cut from search engines, including Google, for every search using Opera’s browser.

Despite the slight loss in 2006, business is brisk and varied. Von Tetzchner describes various deals, with British open-ended system vendor Symbian, manufacturers like Nokia and Motorola, operators KDDI of Japan, and T-Mobile, a subsidiary of German giant Deutsche Telecom, and various end-users. Each market offers a landscape with unique terrain to navigate. In Europe, for example, Opera deals with original equipment manufacturers, who tend to be the decision makers, while in Japan, Korea and the United States, operators tend to decide what software is included on phones, von Tetzchner says.

Industry watchers have noted how competitors like Mozilla Firefox have taken bigger bites out of the desktop browsing market that Microsoft still dominates with 80%-85% of the market. Accounts vary, but until 2004 Microsoft commanded about 95% of the world’s browser market. That share has dropped by about 10% in the past two years, after predation by Firefox, Safari, Opera and Netscape. According to von Tetzchner, his company’s largest browser share, about 10%, is in Russia, and in Scandinavia, where Opera has somewhere between 5%-10%, witheastern Europe, Japan and Australia next in line.

The company’s relationship with Microsoft has been contentious. In 2004, Microsoft, although it was never named officially, reportedly settled out of court a dispute with Opera over alleged malicious programming – for €9.6m. The dispute was over interoperability issues: Microsoft code reportedly made some of its MSN web pages look bad for people who were browsing with Opera. Such confrontations have enhanced Opera’s image as the plucky little browser that can. But for how long?

“Opera’s work is interesting. They’ve so far managed to find a place to survive, but I wonder how seriously he takes the Microsoft threat,” says Mikael Törnwall, an IT reporter for Swedish business daily Dagens Industri. Along these lines, Microsoft can be likened to a locomotive: slow to start but once it gets up a head of steam, unstoppable. If Bill Gates decides to head toward smart phones and other devices, will Opera find itself tied to the tracks in say, three or four years? In the meantime, Opera continues to carve out its niche in devices, and with innovations to its browsers, including features such as tab browsing, sessions, keyboard shortcuts, mouse gestures, and other functions, some of which have been copied by competitors, including Internet Explorer 7, released in 2006.