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Comment by alain94040 | Hacker News Reader

I read the article. Most of the claims are not outrageous. In one place, Apple marketing says "the first popular browser to support..." which, in marketing terms, is meant to rule out Opera. So the claim is technically accurate, slightly misleading, but nothing out of the ordinary for marketing.

Where I think the article is misguided, is that you don't fight marketing with engineering. I mean you can try, but then your only receptive audience are computer geeks.

Of the general population using Safari, IE, and so on, how many care about the exact date, time and seconds when a feature was announced or released by Opera? That's my point. I'm a big fan of being perfectly accurate, but I'm smart enough to know that it's not enough to win in the real world.

Which goes back to one of my favorite topics: if only open source had decent marketing...

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Seems like an issue of business ethics. It is internally inconsistent to endorse a company because they claim to have green products and green policies, but at the same time are known to throw hyperboles left and right. "But it's standard marketing..." is applying conveniently different strictness to different statements from the same company.

The hypocrisy runs deep, everywhere, but many customers are either unaware of it, or pretend it doesn't exist. Marketing is marketing, but it is very dangerous when many people have broken BS filters, and worse, willfully so. I for one appreciate this kind of obsessive nitpicking when available.

The entire problem here, and the one you point out about OSS, rests on education :-) More educators please!

I'm going to go out on a limb and disagree with you entirely. Marketing is not about displaying facts. I'd love it to be about being brutally honest with your product, but if that's how it was then there would be no need for marketing. Instead, marketing is about conveying what you want to convey quickly and without crap. Apple's point is, "Here are our new things. They're really cool." Anything outside of that you've got to implicitly understand is there just for spectacle, and in Apple's case I forgive them entirely, because they're so good at making commercials and ads.

Know what kind of marketing I hate? The sort where you put smiling faces all over and add peripheral features and say "We're a community of happy people," or "We give you an experience", or that use things like ridiculous swooshes and gradients to look nice. Know who does that? Opera Opera Opera. They show smiling users, and their site's all about swooshes and gradients.

And it pisses me off more that Opera is so arrogant about being the first, because guess who they're blatantly stealing from? Apple! Their front page's Latest News aesthetic is ripped directly from Apple's front page. Their layout for browser features on their browser page? That's new: it used to be columns until Apple started their "3-column new features" method of advertising. Their "three snappy words for a product" is taken from Apple. Their font is Myriad Pro, for fuck's sake. Only they don't rip right from Apple, because Apple's schtick is "We show you our product and make that product beautiful enough to market itself", and Opera can't do that. (Maybe now that Hicks is on Opera's team, they can start - I'd love that, since I prefer Opera and their marketing to the browser and marketing of Mozilla - remember that "promotes openness" checkbox on the Firefox vs. Safari page? I do.)

As I said in another comment, at least Apple is honest about their marketing. Their marketing is very blatantly so, and they keep it a point to maintain some integrity: all they talk about are their features. Opera doesn't do that. Most companies don't. As a result, Apple's ads come across every time as refreshing and new, and they don't try to convince you with features that aren't really there. I'm fine with that.

To be cynical, all marketing is untrue. If it was true then they wouldn't have to tell you otherwise.

Try listening to advertising and considering how plausible the _exact opposite_ of what they say is. You'll be surprised.

Not untrue so much as inconsequential. Dave Barry wrote about this pretty famously: if Coke and Pepsi advertise how much better they taste, it's because they taste the same. If a shampoo company markets its special herb, that herb means nothing.

Apple's one of those rare companies that doesn't necessarily do that, because very often they've got something worth getting. I love their commercials where it's just a song and their product lying there, like the Macbook Air and the iMac commercials, because those are the ads where they don't have much to say, so they focus on the sheer beauty of their products. When they do have something big, the ads are incredible. I still love watching the old iPod ads. Incredible clips.

unalone, you're very much correct but there's a nerd skepticism about anything related to "marketing" because nerd populations typically are comprised of people who have a hard time with social soft skills and marketing is the ultimate soft-skill trade.

Nerds, like every other group, denigrate what they lack/have difficulty with, thus the bleating for naked facts... in direct contrast to how human beings work, of course, but c'est la vie.

I actually wrote an article comparing the browser landing pages for Vitamin, based on a talk I did at OSCON (about UX in general). You might find it interesting: http://thinkvitamin.com/features/product-pages-so-much-suck-...

Opera by far had the worst, and even their new improved one was ineffective (altho better than before).

Their current one really rips everything off Apple and Firefox's old design, but they can't even be bothered to do it right.

BTW, fact-seekers, does Opera actually Make You Faster? It is really Safer Internet? Is it true that Opera is Internet browser innovation?

Just checking.

That was a terrific rip-apart! Definitely made my morning.

I'm always curious about how much being a nerd makes people antisocial, versus how much being antisocial makes them nerds.

I'm not sure where you disagreed with me entirely. My point is that I am in support of this kind of very nitpicky writeup. This is in response to "you don't fight marketing with engineering." I am saying you fight it with whatever. Just get different perspectives out there.

I don't know if Opera is arrogant. Maybe they are -- and it's good that you pointed it out. The smiling users bit applies to Apple as well though. It's really not about Opera vs. Apple. It's about knowing that information is veiled, and how to look past that veil, like parsing political speech.

I consider myself a "nerd" but am also exception to ahoyhere's generalization (I also don't think it is a good one, because it is basically describing a psychological defense mechanism, which I doubt is the crux of it). I simply have an obsession with the educational aspect of this.

My first thought as well as soon as I saw 'popular'. That's really all it takes to rule Opera out of consideration. I really doubt many outside of a tech environment have ever even heard of Opera. I still am surprised at those unaware of Firefox.

And something they need to learn, even if you have a superior product, a business requires superior marketing to succeed. Relying on anti-trust lawsuits and 'call to actions' are not really going to advance them to where they want to be. In this case, they come off appearing weak (and starting a wikipedia entry on it, oh please, talk about where factual claims are not going to be represented).

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