Google going to the Opera? Unlikely
Everyone loves a hot rumour, especially about a takeover involving Google — and the hot rumour du jour is that the search company is going to buy Opera, the upstart browser maker. That’s according to Pierre Chappaz, former head of Yahoo Europe, who mentioned it on his French blog (thanks to Om for providing a link to the translated page).
Makes for a great rumour, doesn’t it? Opera is cool, and buying it would re-fuel rumours that Google wants to get into the browser business and go up against Microsoft and Internet Exploder. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really make any sense. Not that buying it would be hard for a company with a market cap of more than $123-billion — the price tag would be a rounding error.
But why? Google hasn’t made a habit of just buying things for the sake of buying things. And as others have noted, Google is pretty close to the Firefox community. Why not just partner with or fund Opera if Google wants to do a deal — like for Larry Page’s Google smart-phone? On a related note, whatever happened to those rumours that Google was about to buy Riya?
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