Nordic Opera

It has to be one of the strangest business plans in the history of the Internet. A small software company based in remote Norway takes on two of the biggest powers in computing, Microsoft and Netscape. Odder still, this tiny firm enters a market—Web browsers—in which the competition gives away its products for free. Are these guys crazy?

Like a fox. Opera Software is not only surviving but thriving. For the past five years the company has been producing a small but fast and nimble browser to rival Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator. Opera's eponymous product has...