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Technology Stocks : Microsoft Corp. - Moderated (MSFT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (7910)	8/24/2004 7:01:58 AM
From: dybdahl	Respond to of 19790

>> Edwards said that staff members are now sent to geography courses to try to avoid such mishaps. "Some of our employees, however bright they may be, have only a hazy idea about the rest of the world," he said. << This is not good enough - courses don't teach enough to understand the topic. The basic problem is, that all the power is in Redmond and software development isn't done locally. It's probably more costeffective to keep everything centrally, but sometimes it's better to make the best product than to keep costs down. Internationalization is more than just translating words and sentences - I use several words daily where the whole concept behind the word doesn't even exist in English. For instance, the whole top menu in applications is often based on how the English language is able to categorize functionality, whereas software developed in other countries would categorize functionality different. This is also why locally made software can be much more intuitive to users than software translated from an English environment. Also, the name of the operating system "Windows" is also "Windows" in most other languages, but to those, the word has no similarity at all with the things in the wall of a building that are made partially of glass - this makes some Microsoft information and advertisement totally incomprehensible to people, that are not really good at English. There was a recent study that shows, that a tribe in Africa, that only had the words "one", "two" and "many" in their language, but not "four" or "five", had big difficulties in managing situations, where the concepts of numbers were involved. The same applies to those who only know the English language - they often simply don't understand the concept of free software (free as in free speech).