Before the weekend, Opera’s CEO, Jon S. von Tetzchner boldy proclaimed at a company meeting that if download numbers of Opera 8 reached 1 million within four days he would swim from Norway to the USA Opera’s communications department could not resist the temptation, and made his statement public. As any respectable CEO and gentlemen, Mr. Tetzchner stands by his word.
Opera’s Mr. Tetzchner stands by his word
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Unless this guy happens to be a professional swimmer in his spare time, he’s probably going to be a goner. I don’t see how a typical person could survive those cold waters for that long.
He’ll swim two miles before they pick him up. I don’t think that swim is even possible, I imagine the water is two cold.
But kudos for tryin it!
Yeah, I’d have to agree. I mean, swimming from Opera’s Headquarters to Denmark would still be really cool and it’s something that isn’t quite as far fetched. Has anyone ever swam the Atlantic Ocean before? What about ships that travel on it? How does one make sure they aren’t run over?
Not only do I really dig their browser (using the freebee of it here at work [all home copies are paid for]), but the “reports” of his swim are as funny as the “Swedish Chef” version of Opera.
(I’m sending this story to one of my co-workers as a timely reminder of *his* vow “to climb a flag pole naked” if we got a certain project funded.)
I know someone tried to cross the Atlantic, but somewhere near the equator, where its much warmer. Not sure if they finished.
I was thinking he’d fulfill it with a swimming pool on an airplane or something.
can you say “water wings”
He swims in the heated pool of an ocean liner that is crossing the Atlantic?
He never qualified “how” he would swim across the Atlantic! 😉
Even if he did do it would take him forever and a day. Figuring 10 miles a day in the cold water(caloric intake would be astouding) it probably take roughly a year at that rate.
Swim an entire ocean??? It would take months to cross, and I really doubt he could even go more than a few hours. Especially if he starts in Norway, where he would quickly freeze to death.
He’d obviously be with a boat the whole time for safety reasons, and swim a few miles at a time then get on the boat to rest. I know people have swam very large distances this way before.
70 days to cross
6-8 hours of swimming a day
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benoit_Lecomte
A little swim-consulting wouldn’t hurt.
If this guy swims across the Atlantic Ocean, I’ll swim across the Pacific Ocean.
I don’t want to discuss about Mr. Tetchner chances for crossing the ocean (btw. it’s not really presumably 😉 but what is more interesting is the echo in the media about this funny bet of him.
This is a really clever way to catch publicity and focus this attention on a company or on a product (= Opera browser).
I can imagine that a lot of people will be positivly suprised of this humorous kind of leading a it company. It’s a fresh opposite to some monopolistic companies (do you know who is meant??? 😉
And if it works perfectly a few of this people will give Opera a try, ant due this their will be convinced by the quality of this webrowser:
A really clever publicty move!!!
Note: I don’t want to start a flame war about which browser is better/best! I just want to point out this, in my eyes, fancy way to work with the media.
http://people.opera.com/nicolasm/opera_ch05.svgz
(SVG support required)
Alternative:
Iceland sits on both European and North American plates. And it happens that in national park in Iceland where the plates meet, there’s a lake :>
this is so funny! when they finally release a non-beta os x version, i’ll probably buy it in support 🙂
-Kevin
I think this is a very funny and well-succeeded PR stunt, even though it is only a PR stunt.
The quest is over ;o)
But it’s a far cry more amusing and entertaining than most PR stunts you see for stuffy things like web browsers.
Of course, I’ve been an Opera user since 4.0, so they don’t get more out of me except a continued loyal customer.
I find it kind of sad that Opera 8.0 has better linux integration than Mozilla Firefox. It has keyboard shortcuts closer to UNIX defaults, it has X session support (The session saver plugin IS NOT the same), it directly uses the konqueror bookmarks (No import needed) and it uses the already installed plugins for mozilla.
i will rather not download opera than see this man get injured because of his foolish promise… I hope the no. of downloads that he requires don’t get fulfilled…
trust me…this guyz mad!
Too late, read the article 🙂