- Posted by sondreb on June 3, 2007
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My good friend Scott Hanselman convinced me to move my family online services to Google Apps. To begin with I had my doubt on moving all my e-mail into Google's hands, but I have for years hosted the solution on my own home server and it was time to move on and expand.
Now all the members of my family (we are aprox. 60 in total) can get free e-mail addresses, calendar that we can share, documents archive online and a personalized portal.
But now we move back to the topic of this post, internationalization and localization. This is a subject that is close to my heart and I have done lots of work with it in the past. When I used to work for Digimaker on their CMS, we did a lot of work making sure that everything had good support for internationalization and localization. Both in terms of the administrative UI being able to render different languages to the user depending on their preferences, but also rendering right-to-left for our arabic customers.
It's not an easy subject and most developers doesn't like to think or care about it, which is sad because there is so much reward in this field for the customers and users. When you see how happy a customer becomes when the software they are required to use many times a week finally arrives in a language that is native to them, you'll realize that you should have done it from the beginning at the project and not as an afterthought that many do.
While there has always been issues to complain about in regards to this topic, my recent interest was triggered by Apple Safari browser for Windows, which had some nasty issues. Have a look at at the Issue List for Safari which I made.
And then Scott got me into Google Apps, which is when more trouble arrived. I couldn't use my last name during the registration of our Google Apps account. But to my big supprise today, when you have established the Apps account, you are allowed to use international characters when registering new users. Good work Google, but no thanks for making me edit all the user accounts...
But this is what happens if you try and register a new Google Apps account.
With the improved DNS protocol we are now allowed to buy internationalized domain names, which I recently got for our family. But it doesn't seem like Google Apps is happy about that.
Before I moved over to Google Apps, I was running everything on my local Windows Server 2003, but things are not a whole lot better there. I realize that Windows Server is getting old now, but there has been Service Pack releases that could have added support for internationalized domain names.
I am currently reading .NET Internationalization: The Developer's Guide to Building Global Windows and Web Applications by Guy Smith-Ferrier, which looks to be a very solid book and reference for everyone developing .NET solutions. Make sure you order a copy and start to optimize your solutions towards a more international and global market.
Before I end this post, I would like to note that this is not only about texts in different languages, dates and numbers in different formats. It's also about opening up your products and services towards the global markets. Internationalization can be both positive and negative, depending on it's implementation and usage.
Take for example the Xbox Live Service. This is a service that is different in USA, Europe and Japan (Asia). The US version has lots of movies and TV shows that you can rent and buy. It has the very latest movie trailers, and game demos. Asia is very different from the Western world and I personally don't know much about their version of Xbox Live, but I'm sure it's more well fit towards that market than what the US version is.
But then we arrive at the European version. Europe is just as western as the US. Why make a difference between the two regions? My personal experience with the European version of Xbox Live is very poor. There are very few movie trailers online, and most of them I have already watched in the cinema long before they arrive on Live. There are no movie rental or TV show service available. And Microsoft have recently started blocking Xbox users from the US Live Service by IP-ranges, so I can no longer legally (I doubt it was legal to begin with, me being located in Europe) buy my favorite TV shows...
The same applies to the Zune device, it's a decent music player but not out on the European market yet, so I'm not allowed to use European credit card to pay for the music subscription service. There are countless other services that are only available in USA and Canada, and I'm sure many of you have experienced the same pain it is to deal with these conditions. You try and throw money at them, but they just won't take it.
Why do we still have zones on DVDs (HD-DVD/BlueRay), when top Hollywood movies is released simultaneously around the world anyhow? As a matter of fact, I watched Lord of the Rings and Superman and many other movies before people in the US could watch them. Don't get me started on DRM and music services. In the US, the MSN Music Service (replaced with Zune Marketplace) in the USA was very nice, but in Europe it was hosted, administrated and run by a totally different (and European) company. It had a different architecture, different DRM implementation and worse user experience.
So go on and be a hero, make sure your products and services works optimal for everyone by doing good internationalization and localization.