For last few weeks Facebook is just buzzing the market for all sort of reasons – good and bad both. And the trend is not going to die down soon apparently. With the latest buzz, Facebook is reportedly showing interest in acquiring Opera Software, the company behind the development of Mobile and Desktop Opera Browser. Though, it’s not the first ever acquisition of Facebook, few tech giants are showing unusual responses and activities over the possible buyout – especially Google and Apple.
Opera Acquisition By Facebook:
There is still no official statement on such deal from any of the side but if we believe on the rumor, Facebook is pretty aggressive and excited over possibilities of Opera acquisition. And, yes it makes perfect sense too.
As per Opera, more than 200 million users are currently connected with the browser across all its platform. Company has also registered an impressive growth in last two years. Facebook is well settle with cash reserve and instead of making a fresh investment to reinvent the wheel of browser development, it’s always an intelligent move to acquire already rocking Opera. With the sudden access over 900 million users of Facebook, Opera can surely – and suddenly – improve its market share from current 1.72% to atleast 8% to 9%, which is higher than Apple Safari browser.
Facebook Mobile Users Growth Challenge
The biggest challenge for Facebook these days – besides post IPO Blues – is to control the portability of platform by users. Company has been witnessing significant shift in users from Desktop to Mobile platform resulting in appreciation of its mobile traffic. However, Facebook has not launched any revenue model to monetize its mobile traffic. That means, users are being distanced from the ads and other streams which are the main source of revenue for the company.
Therefore, it has become inevitable for the company to keep mobile platform on low priority for any more time. In such scenario, the acquisition of Opera will surely strengthen the presence of social networking giant among mobile users as well as in mobile industry. This is will also help Facebook in developing a strong ecosystem around the mobile users which could later get transformed into an extension of service in mobile arena. Undoubtedly, the leader in mobile OS, Google is closely monitoring such development and can’t afford to give one more chance to Facebook to leapfrog.
Facebook Is Ready With Its ‘Phone’
Let me put few ‘initiatives’ which materialized in last few months
- Facebook has got its own Camera for Android and iOS platform both
- Facebook launched App Store
- Facebook launched “Mobile Messenger”
Now, think of above with conjunction of below aspects:
- Facebook has got its own fully powered mobile app
- Facebook is reportedly working on social search engine.
- Facebook has ‘support’ from Microsoft – a company which has got its own Bing Map and controls VoIP service leader “Skype”.
And I am sure with last few nails in the coffin, like Opera acquisition, Facebook is in pretty impressive state to launch its ‘own phone’ which is enough to dismantle Apple and Google both.
Besides everything, all major tech giants, who have secured the supreme position in their respective field, have got their own web browser influence market; Microsoft with IE, Apple with Safari, Google with Chrome and Mozilla with Firefox are just growing stronger. Though, Chrome and Safari are the only gainers in the market, Facebook Opera browser will have all potential to jeopardize the current state of browser market. But, all such combination and permutation are dependent only on one thing – If Facebook really acquires Opera browser !
