I know - if you look at Germany or other non-English European country, the situation is not much different. I heard that Microsoft once did a TV commercial in Germany, but I'm not sure. My parents see german television daily, but they never saw it.
According to the link, XP Home does not include NTFS at all, so it cannot be default if Microsoft's information is correct.
If you visit Europe, please note that:
- England is very different from the rest of Europe. To most europeans, England is closer to U.S. than to the rest of Europe in many issues.
- The opinions differ greatly depending on who you speak to and how you do it, and it differs greatly from country to country who says what.
- There is a big difference in the use of language between the U.S. and Europe. Most europeans don't understand the "how do you do" stuff used by Americans. In many places, what seems to be smalltalk isn't and otherwise. Personally I find it much easier to communicate with Italians than with Americans.
- Europeans are often very interested. Doesn't mean they will become customers. When I worked at Brüel & Kjær, we had a simple rule: Americans use 30% of the functionality of our product. Europeans use 80%, Japanese try to use 110% of the functionality. And I believe that is quite correct.
- Europeans are extremely interested when foreigners speak if they know English well. If they don't know English well, they tend not to be interested.
- Infrastructure differs enormously. France still invests in the predecessor of the Internet, the minitel, because they can do online trades much more easily there than on the internt. Scandinavia has a very high deployment of mobile phones and PCs. South European countries have much less Internet in general than the north European countries.
Generally, europeans are very interested in 802.11 and stuff like that, but instant messaging is mainly a teenage thing because it's cheaper than SMS, whereas companies mainly use SMS, and 802.11 never really seems to take off. There are a lot of pioneers in the field, but organizations often stop 802.11 when they start to consider security issues. At home, 802.11 is simply too expensive for the average user.
Remote desktops are in widely use - one of the major international remote desktop software vendors is Danish. But Windows XP doesn't introduce much extra functionality - they just include it.
Netmeeting has been around for a very long time - but only very, very few people have actually tried it. And the more ADSL is coming (Cable is not widely used here), the more NAT firewalls there are blocking Netmeeting. But I guess XP solves that by using Microsoft servers for transmission, am I right?
Right now, the mobile phone market seems to be saturated in several European countries. Everybody has a mobile phone, and the sales focus is now on upgrades/replacements, not on new customers. On the other hand, overcharged SMS's have grown explosively. This simple messaging system simply seems to become the main internet payment method in Europe in a couple of years, maybe extended with newer technology and a new name.
It really caught me as a surprise when I heard that the number of mobile phone online transactions was actually higher than the number of credit card transactions, and that the mobile phone growth was bigger. SMS is already big, but this could really become something very big.
When it comes to data transmission, Europe uses the GSM 900/GSM 1800 system all over. Countries like Denmark have 100% nation coverage, and even countries like Sweden have very dense coverage. I can be in the middle of a big forest, 25km to the nearest small shop, and I got good GSM coverage. Roaming works perfectly - when I'm at the beach to Sweden I can choose between 5 different phone networks, and they all provide good coverage.
GSM only provides 14.400kbps (actual data rate, not signalling rate), which is why GPRS was invented. GPRS is an always-on technology with much higher transmission capabilities, but it seems that internet access is still mostly done from desktops. Many thought that GPRS would rise faster as it did, it just didn't.
The successor, UMTS, provides many megabits of bandwidth, with up to nationwide coverage. Unfortunately, the market has proven to be smaller than expected, and many countries will not provide more than 30% nationwide geographical coverage to start with, focusing on populated areas. As far as I remember, UMTS can provide up to 6Mbps, even if you are in the middle of a forest, from your mobile phone.
In other words, Europe is very much focused on:
- Services (end-user, typically websites).
- Security and privacy (also companies!).
- Network bandwidth.
- Integration and functionality.
When it comes to Security and Privacy, XP has just won a Big Brother award in Australia... nothing more to say about that.
Network bandwidth expenses compete with PC expenses. The more the end-user pays for bandwidth, the less there is for PCs. In companies, firewalls, internet servers etc. all take money from buying PCs.
When it comes to integration etc., Microsoft has proven themselves to be incompatible again and again. If you install Office 2000 from scrath, it won't provide the Office 97 API's - which means that any solution developed with Office 97 requires you to install Office 97 in the lifetime of that solution. You may upgrade to Office 2000, but not do a clean install.
Maybe you have found some interesting mood here and there - what counts, is if it turns to sales, and how much sales it makes.
Lars. |
