Opera Would Be "Another Stupid Acquisition" for Facebook, Says Analyst

Opera may be a good browser, but there's one analyst who thinks the idea of a Facebook acquisition would be downright stupid. "Opera is a good browser, and most of its traction comes from feature phones," said Trip Chowdhry, the Managing Director of Equity Research at Global Equities Research. "Opera has very good technology, which reduces bandwidth usage. Hence Opera makes web browsing from mobile devices cheap, especially in the situations where the user does not have unlimited data plans." That said, Chowdhry believes that Facebook's mobile problems "are not going to be fixed by buying a mobile browser company." "As a matter of fact, it is totally irrelevant from FB['s] perspective, as Opera will narrow [the] FB ecosystem and not broaden it, which FB desperately needs right now," said Chowdhry. "In Mobile, FB needs a solution that expands its ecosystem, both from developer perspective as well as from distribution perspective and this can only happen by innovation and not by acquisition of Opera." Further, Chowdhry said that in a world where HTML5 will dominate, "Facebook needs to invent an Application publishing platform, which sits in-between the developer and the browser." "This platform should allow a developer to create an application in any of their favorite tools, which could be from Microsoft MSFT, Google GOOG, Mozilla, Adobe ADBE, or any other Open Source tool and then transparently publish it to any Application WebStore -- could be Google's Chrome Webstore, Apple App Store, Microsoft App Store, etc.," Chowdhry added. "By inventing the above system, FB will get both the developer ecosystem as well as distribution ecosystem." "Buying Opera will likely be another stupid acquisition, the previous one being Instagram," Chowdhry concluded. Follow me @LouisBedigianBZ