Do your job (Saturated Market)

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Do your job

Strategy There's a saying that goes something along the lines of, "if you try to be something to everyone, you're nothing to noone," though I may be completely off base. What I mean is, you need to find a core, you need to find what you're really in business to do, and make sure you stick to it. Because if you try to venture too far outside that, you could lose sight of where you started. And I'm going to convey this with the use of an allegory.

When I bought my new computer, I had to reinstall all my favourite programs and set up all my options again. But I decided, on the advice of several tech-savvy associates, to use Opera as my internet browser instead of my old standby, Firefox.

At first, I was very happy. It was fast, it had the functions I was accustomed to, and I really liked the gestures and speed dial. Gestures allow you to perform ordinary functions (back, forward, new tab, close tab, etc) by using quick mouse movements. For example, holding down the right mouse button and flicking the mouse left would take me back a page. And the speed dial allowed me to set up to 9 pages in a special bookmark page (reached whenever a new tab opened or all other tabs were closed) so I could click on them. Pretty nifty.

But then the problems started showing up. Many websites, sites that I use frequently like Google Maps, would not load. I could refresh until the cows came home, but no luck. Also, changing default options such as changing Google.com in the search bar to Google.ca required actually hacking a system file. And I could select dropdown menu options. I'd open the menu, click on what I wanted, and the menu would just close. I'd have to use the arrow keys to move to what I wanted; particularly irritating when updating this site, as I have to use one to select the category and one to tell it to publish.

Now, this doesn't sound like reason enough to leave. So a few pages weren't loading. So changing the search bar default wasn't intuitive. So I couldn't use dropdown menus. Is that so bad? Yes! I would contend that if your internet browser doesn't browse the internet, that is a problem. Opera came in with all these new features, but seems to fall short on actually displaying web pages. And that's what its primary goal is.

For the record, while gestures and speed dial were cool ideas, they weren't enough to save this browser. I didn't use them enough to justify it. If I want to go back, or forward, or use tabs, it's not like it's a complicated process. Point and click is just as simple as click and flick. And speed dial? Why do I need a second bookmark folder? The one I have is good enough.

So in the end, I have returned to Firefox thanks to Opera's feature creep. The cool stuff wasn't enough to make up for poor performance in what I originally needed it to do.

There is a moral to this story. I hope you remember not to be like Opera, or the fat lady may start singing for you.

Until next time,