...we didn't even have a Japanese version in 2002. Now we have a very significant brand, which is being used in all the products on the mobile side.
Besides the desktop, where do you see the potential growth coming from?
Mostly mobile, but I think there's a lot of potential in all the markets. The set-top box and TVs and cars and planes — there's a lot of different places where using Web technology makes a lot of sense.
What exactly are your plans to really build out your presence here in the American market?
We're putting more and more people on the ground here in the United States... .The mobile market in this country has been trailling the rest of the world. But we expect that there's going to be a total change in the next five years when it comes to browsers and phones.
You'll have full browsers like Opera on the phone, and we think we have the strongest product in that market. We're going to push very hard to make sure that we have the market share that we should be having.
In Europe, are you seeing that shift?
There's a significant movement toward this... It's taken a few years, but it's happening now.
Are you seeing real consumer applications yet?
Well, I mean, we were on 8.8m phones last year, and that's up from two million the year before and 200,000 the year before that. So I think there's a definite trend.
Do you expect companies will stop making WAP Web sites and just start doing HTML?
I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean WAP doesn't really have a future. I think most people realise that. With WAP 1, it was a totally separate thing, right. With WAP 2, it's still close to the Web but it's still incompatible. So why have this separate network?
What's likely to change in five years from what we see today in the average browser?
I think there's going to be added a lot of features, but there's going to be more standards and there's going to be more things happening. Microsoft has been stifling this for a long time because in a way, if we add something new, even though it's a standard, it doesn't change anything. Our market share, whether it's 1 percent, or 5 percent or whatever, it doesn't really matter. In that way, we can't change the standards, but now we have a possibility to do so.
This is why Firefox is positive for us, because when the two of us implement a new standard, maybe even together with Apple, then we actually have the possibility to change.
So, are you saying then that the same metaphor for a browser is not really going to radically change?
There are more and more applications coming up. You can actually write full programs with the Web browser. That's one of the changes that have been happening. We want to make it possible to do more advanced things... .One of the changes that's going to be happening in the next few years is all these mobile devices and set-top box devices — they don't have the standard screen size of a PC and don't have the standard resolution. Web designers may not have been willing to actually gather for people with accessibility issues, but they will have to gather for this, and the good part is that the side effect of that will be that it will help for accessibility as well.
What's life as a public company like?
I think you can say it's been good. Some of the investors want short-term gains, but I think most of the investors we have are long-term. They understand that what we're doing is something that takes time, that you have to build on things and it's important that we position ourselves correctly.
