Out of touch? No, just out of scope...

re: Out of touch? No, just out of scope...

Michael S. Kaplan — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:04:22 GMT

That's kinda my point -- you can't give the decision makers maybes with no proof as a strategy. You have to be able to explain why changing the language plan would make a difference, and how much (of course with numbers and other proof to back up the claim!).

re: Out of touch? No, just out of scope...

Otaku — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:46:55 GMT

Michael - platform adoption continues to remain a significant priority and always a challenge. WinXP is still the dominant OS. Linux made netbooks significant and then Vista couldn't be run on them, so XP was used to remove Linux from that space. The increase in OSX usage in the consumer market and other smaller verticals continues to be an issue.

But in not arguing this point, the business side of the equation makes even less sense. Trust me, it's not a huge money maker for MSFT in consideration of other businesses. There is not much growth opportunity here. It's akin to saying that MS Learning has a real P&L - if that were true, MSL would have been out of business a long time ago. It just seems to me that there are bigger fish to fry than these nickels and dimes - it causes confusion at the expense of CPE.

On the note from the other reader that seems like it prompted the post above, and not directed at you as an individual, most MSFT employees have little to no idea the amount of impact Microsoft has on people's lives and work - both good and bad. I know we think we do - but mostly we're just working hard. You and I are (well, you are, I was) just regular employees going about our jobs, trying to do the right thing. Firstly to meet the approval of our management and secondly to keep an eye on what customers want or what we think they want. The fact that we're held accountable by people outside of MSFT can be unnerving and uncomfortable. I get was you're saying - I was in PSS/CSS for my first 5 years and took a ton of heat, many times in a very negative way, from customers who blamed me personally for issues. It didn't feel good. I was just one guy. Why are they blaming me - it's not like I could personally fix Exchange (ugh...hotfixes were the worst political mess of people disagreeing to disagree I ever saw). But in retrospect, that's probably why CPE even came about - to give a regular MSFT employee the opportunity to advocate at a much higher level in the company than he/she would normally do on behalf of customers. Maybe just trying to send these issues up through http://gethelp and following through could do something different. It's worth a shot.

re: Out of touch? No, just out of scope...

Cheong — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 01:52:47 GMT

@Otaku: I think, If you family is multilangual one, at least you'll have one language in common. For internet cafe or airport kiosks, the OS would be either English or their local language is well understood. And with AppLocale, you can run most application for different language in different language version of Windows without problem. The problem might not be as serious as you think.

For languages that has support only in LIP version, I'd think LIP is enough. Afterall, for most non-developers, what they really focus is on the application (which should be properly localized version if the user really cares about language). Give them comprehensible menu so that you could access their program, and maybe perform shutdown, would be good enough for them. Afterall, for most users, if a warning/error dialog comes up, either they immediately close them without paying attention, or they learnt to screen-cap them to post in forums, they they might get more help if those message is in English.

re: Out of touch? No, just out of scope...

Michael S. Kaplan — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 22:57:03 GMT

I don't know if I agree with all of that. I mean, has *adoption* of Windows really been a problem? Not so much. If you go with that argument they shoot you right down.

They believe it does make money and may have number that prove it, and of course prior to jiggering with numbers there has to be a lot more than "may end up making more money in the long run" as the reason to change this one part of a huge formula that pays out needs a stronger benefit.

I agree there is an argument that can be made here, but when one is going up against as much money as this one must have a much more compelling method to persuade folks! :-)

re: Out of touch? No, just out of scope...

Otaku — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 17:46:42 GMT

Yeah, I'm confused about this whole thing too (and I worked for MSFT for 10 years!). It appears that the key strategy here should be platform adoption and to increase that, offering things that I call "utility features" (like languages, a calculator, a browser) should be free. I remember when the first version of VSTO was available for an enormous amount of money and no one bought it. Then it became free (and better) to enable both Visual Studio and Office adoption.

And there shouldn't be anything like LP or LIP or UI Language. Just say "do you want Chinese on your English box?" If the answer is yes, say "Do you want to display everything in Chinese or just have it enabled to type?". And that's it. Proofing tools come with that, if available. MS Update notices it's enabled and offers that for download. Simple.

I can't image this makes a lot of money for MSFT...at all. In fact, offering it for free (and making it all simple) may end up making more money in the long run. I get why it was done back in the day when many of the natual language efforts were semi-unified on teams and in some products, like around the year 2000, but this is a different time.

It's a weird kind of punishment for people in which two or more languages are needed on a computer. Take a multi-lingual family, for example. Or an internet cafe. Or an airport kiosk. In these situations, you may want two or more log-ons for users that require different languages. In this case, if it was two English speakers - no cost to anyone. If there was a need for English, Arabic and Turkish on one box, now the user pays more. Punishment for needing different languages.

Maybe Bing can start charging 5 cents per webpage translation. I'm sure that would go over well :)