Norway Gets a Netscape IPO?

OK, not quite, but Opera is planning to go public. The company recently posted a slight profit, and intends to raise money to compete with MSFT in the mobile arena. The lede in this Reuters piece brought on some odd deja vu…

Norway’s Opera Software said on Monday it plans an initial public offering in March to aid its race against giant rival Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT – news- people) to win customers for its Internet browsers in the growing mobile phone market.

Let’s hope Opera execs don’t dismiss MSFT Windows as a pile of “poorly debugged device drivers“….