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Comment by jernfrost | Hacker News Reader

As a Norwegian I am not sure what to think about this. Every single dam successful tech company created in this country gets bought out: Fast, Trolltech, Tandberg and now Opera. And I've been part of several which has experienced this. Sometimes it might make the product bigger in the market but often it has not been a success. Certainly not seen from a Norwegian perspective, with respect to jobs or corporate culture.

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Well, Microsoft has maintained the development teams in Norway, so there's that. And Opera didn't wait to be purchased to dump a bunch of people in Oslo. I can't really speak as to the Trolltech and Tandberg jobs, though.

Trolltech (now the Qt Company) did manage to maintain its staff across a few acquisitions and split, some of the most senior staff still remains active at the company.

I'd rather say this is not just Opera side has moved on, many people left Opera before the several rounds of layoffs, and some choose not to stay even when they are offered a new position (myself included).

I wonder if that's because their owners have been fellow Nordic companies, and thus had less of a clash of cultures.

I think the real problem there is that with this kind of stuff, one can scale market presence without scaling the workforce like we are used to from physical industries.

Something that really makes one wonder about the "sanity" of the 68-ers idea of education fixing all woes.

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