I’ve just spent an interesting few days trying to get the Opera I purchased for USD 39 to perform acceptably. And when it didn’t, I tried to avail myself of the Premium Support my USD 39 entitled me to.

You see, I was laboring under the assumption that since Opera Software was a .com and charged money for their unencumbered, fully supported software, that I was not dealing with an open source, contributor staffed organization.

Well excepting the money that changed hands, all other transactions were completely ala open-source-org.

I dealt exclusively with one Lars Kleinschmidt, Technical Service Consultant, Opera Software. Now Mr. Kleinschmidt has a very straightforward approach to paid support. He never burdened either me or himself with queries about my system or environment. He never embarrassed me with questions about my level of expertise. He never even bothered to clutter my email with lengthy explanations or possible solutions. His approach was, as I said, straightforward. He simply referred me to FAQ links, or tersely committed non-committal. At one point in my queries to understand how to get certain basic functionalities from the mail included in Opera (which, btw, are often supplied by unsupported 3rd party software), he informed me that if I didn’t like the mail in Opera, I didn’t have to use it!

The last straw came when Opera would not recognize the Adobe plugin on my system, no matter what I tried, even the FAQ solutions didn’t work. Despite all efforts, it still downloaded the pdf files (not temporarily as others do) and then opened Adobe and turned the system over to it.

We went back and forth several times over this. I even tried downloading other browsers to illustrate that they either would or would not recognize the plugin. They did. And, I might add, without having to go through the gyrations the FAQ from Opera proposed.

His final query was, well was I interested in discussing technical issues or solving my problem. I informed him that my problem was solved. I had trash canned Opera!

I requested a refund, but haven’t heard anything. Based on the technical support, I don’t envision the sales support to be of any higher calibre, and I don’t expect to ever see my USD 39 again.

Software version:

Opera 8.0