Another nice marketing idea from Opera.
After the last rumours about Opera going freeware there were two possibilites. The rumours were right or wrong (Oh! So wise!). If the rumours were right, preparing such campaign is a very clever move. You get free news/press, you get blog news etc. People keeps talking about Opera. They might do some more “promotions” like this before really switching to freeware. Bravo!
If the rumours were wrong, then they must do actions like this not to gather bad press (imagine article “Everyone was sure that Opera will be freeware, but they only gave their users new forums… Such a disappointment”).
I think that the former one is truth, and Opera is just playing with the last days of occasional promotions for product that will be free in a short time.
For example, imagine the amount of people who promoted Opera with buttons for weeks, months, to get those 250 clicks… And I got Opera with one small email. But the amount of noise in press about both actions is the same, so Opera wins.
I’m still saying that Mozilla should learn from Opera that sometimes you can do small step to gather big marketing advantage (as my favourite example – we really could’ve SVG first).