Your view of the PC is very different from what I see.
- Differences in A4 and Letter paper sizes are handled quite well by most printers today, no problem.
- It's 230V in Europe, not 220V, but many devices do both 230V and 110-120V fine. 50Hz and 60Hz.
- A system that includes a PC can be quite difficult to export across the atlantic. Only very few PCs are approved on both sides.
- Windows differs greatly from language to language. On Danish, Word 97 and Word 2000 use incompatible file formats.
- Microsoft Access Basic and MS Office Basic uses a mix of English and Localized languages, sometimes making it impossible to upgrade from one version to another unless you used the U.S. version to create the file with.
- Most Microsoft products have not been localized to many languages, making them incomprehensible for the population. It has been easy for you, since you know English.
- Windows is available in many incompatible versions. More than 15% of the visitors on www.traditioner.dk use Windows 95. Most use Windows 98. Some use Windows Me, NT4, Windows 2000. XP will probably enter the list soon. Additionally, you have XP Embedded, NT embedded, Windows CE in various versions. I know no program that runs on all these versions, even Microsoft delivers a special internet explorer for Windows CE.
- Character sets vary. Most Windows applications still use 8-bit character sets and cause trouble across languages.
- Most Windows versions out there have different binaries for different languages. Important patches are often up to several months late in localized versions, and conflicts between localized DLLs and U.S. DLLs often cause instabilities.
If you look at Linux, however, this is handled very differently. The same binaries and file formats are used in all languages, and localization is not done to programming languages, making it 100% compatible across language barriers. In other words, the non-monopoly does it better than the monopoly. |
