Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

anonymuos — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:38:16 GMT

The best enhancement you could have made is making the MUI feature available to Home Premium SKU and above or at least Professional, so users could have purchased the English language version and still used MUI. Now I'm forced to buy a localized version of Home Premium because I don't need or want Ultimate.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

boen_robot — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:09:36 GMT

I agree with anonymuos... when someone buys a new PC, they are locked in by whatever version the OEM has selected. Many OEMs choose English rather than a localized build. In some countries (e.g. Bulgaria... my country) it appears as if there aren't any local OEMs, but only merchants that take computers from other EU OEMs with Home Premium installed, thereby eliminating all possibility for a localized build for the end user.

The only way a user of such a region can get a localized build is to then buy *another* Windows license for the localized Home Premium or (better yet) buy a PC with Linux or no OS, then get such a license separately. This makes Windows more expensive than it already is, so many users choose to get a non-licensed version.

The simple solution is to make MUIs available in Home Premium (at least!) and (perhaps) Business versions. Ideally, on all versions.

Other than that - thanks. I'm glad that Bulgarian will be there in the October release.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

sevenflavor — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:19:48 GMT

As a user, I'm dissatisfied with the control Windows offers over applying/choosing fonts and typographical features. The common dialogs for choosing fonts and color have remained the same since Windows 95. Look at Word's font dialog or OS X's font panel (www.xvsxp.com/system/fonts_apply.php) and (www.hopelessgeek.com/2003/10/24/panthers-major-text-services-upgrade) which have so many text effects such as shadows, outline etc compared to Windows 7's. There should be a more easy and visual way of inserting Unicode characters rather than the ALT codes. Character Map's remained the same since so many years; it has an extremely tiny character preview and doesn't even quickly let me preview the same character or its variations in different typefaces. Word's Insert Symbol dialog is so much more advanced. Also, Windows doesn't have a typography panel. Why aren't text effects and more text services (such as universal spell check, hyperlink detection, smart quotes, system wide autocorrect/autoformat, favorites and styles) built into the standard Windows text engine-Uniscribe? The system supplied "Text Services" are so lacking. As for the font control panel and in the new Fonts dropdown boxes (used in Paint and WordPad), for any language, the actual preview of the font still shows in English which is useless and not in that language's script?!?

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

someone — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:38:48 GMT

Microsoft should ship a phonetic keyboard layout for Indian/Devanagari languages. It's extremely difficult to remember the keyboard layout unless it's phonetic. संकेत चिह्न निर्माण :P

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

CuriousCoder — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:23:17 GMT

I had trouble using more than a couple languages with RC. For whatever reason, if I added more than 3-4 (I forget exactly), I had problems updating and had to reinstall from scratch.

Generally I only need a couple, but when you have multiple users their preferences are different, so it'd be great if installing more than a few languages at a time Just Worked out-of-the-box.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

JF7 — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:25:11 GMT

This is great, but can I make a passionate plea for something else? Win7 is just a few days away from RTM and we want to avoid the device driver problems that plagued Vista.

PLEASE PLEASE confirm that Microsoft's engineers are helping nVidia, ATI, Brother, HP, Dell, etc. to get their device drivers ready to go even BEFORE we can download the gold bits and certainly before the Oct 22nd retail release.

And PLEASE, not just for the new stuff, we don't want the *lack* of device drivers to be used as a slimey sales tactic to push new hardware sales.

My company has a ton of Dell Latitude D600's and D820's, for example, that are used for sales presentations, but we can't use Win7 on them because there's no video drivers available that can dual-display on projectors.

I don't know how else to BEG and PLEAD with Microsoft to get it right this time. The IT press and pundits are going to CRUCIFY you AGAIN if the device driver problem re-emerges, even a whiff of driver problems and they are all going to yell "See!!! They still don't get it!!!"

So, yes, it's nice that you've got improved support for other languages, cheers to you, but what difference does it make if I can't even use the new OS on my current systems because of a lack of device drivers????? And we can't go out and buy new hardware because of the recession and budget cuts.

So, to start, PLEASE call nVidia and Dell and tell them to publish their Win7 drivers *NOW*, don't wait until December, it'll be too late then, the IT media will have thoroughly crucified you again....

Thank You.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

ShadowChaser — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:32:46 GMT

Great post, and I really appreciate the attention to detail put into Windows' localization.

One issue I've faced is that the English (Canada) region formats don't make any sense at all.

Short dates are in the correct Canadian format (31/01/2009), but long dates almost appear "computery" rather than in normal English, as you would expect.

A long date in English (Canada) appears as: "July-07-09". As far as I know, no one uses the format anywhere in Canada - we write long dates the same as in the United States: "Tuesday, July 07, 2009".

The change happened (I believe) in Vista, and believe it was in error. The Canadian federal government lists dates like "July-07-09" on their website, which is where I believe the Vista team "picked up" the format from. I'm not sure if they're just using it randomly or it's some strange "federal standard", but *no* English speaking Canadian uses that format. At one point, I even scanned some front pages of newspapers as proof.

Another issue in the Canadian locales is during installation. If an English speaking Canadian chooses "English (Canada)", the "Canadian French" and "Canadian Multilingual Standard" keyboards get installed along with the "US" keyboard.

It's a HUGE usability issue here in Canada - everyone uses US keyboards *except* for French Canadian users who custom order their computers. Not only does the ugly language toolbar appear all over the desktop for English users who will never use it, the multilingual shortcuts are also enabled. Even as I was writing this post, I switched to English (Canada). Now, keystrokes like double quote appear as È and apostrophes appear as è.

I must have hit some key combination, but if I immediately canèt figure out how I did as a senior software developer, how can you expect a standard user to know what's going on? :(

Currency and time appear correct - it's the long date format and the automatic installation of French keyboards for English users that give everyone here the biggest headaches.

Everyone I know runs English (United States) in Canada, mainly because Windows has always gotten Canadian localization wrong.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

bananaman — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:58:12 GMT

ShadowChaser, I get the same thing on my Vista box here at work (also a software developer), get crazy È's start appearing out of nowhere.

Probably an accidental key combination that causes it but I never know how to fix it. Guess us non-Francophone Canadians should just use the US keyboard setting!

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

someone — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:51:59 GMT

@ShadowChaser and bananaman,

Left Alt+Shift switches the input language. Press it again to switch back. You can change this shortcut in Region and Language (Regional and Language Options) -> Langauges tab -> Details -> Key Settings. Microsoft should have put "Text Services and Input Languages" directly into the Control Panel.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

Vyacheslav Lanovets — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:32:58 GMT

In spite of all efforts to make Windows perfect global product it is still much better in its original language - US English.

Unfortunately, unlike in Bulgaria, in Russia one can hardly find laptop with English Windows preintalled. And, while retail copies if localized Windows cost more in Russia than English copies in US, the latter ones cost even more.

I hope, one day Windows will allow to switch to English MUI at least in Business Edition.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

rickbrew — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:49:56 GMT

Text, fonts, typography ... they are so deceptively simple on the surface. The rabbit hole goes very deep though ... I've been doing development with the typography API's in GDI, GDI+, WPF, and DirectWrite over the last 2 months and it continues to overwhelm me with its complexity. However, over time I continue to get an appreciation for just how necessary the complexity is, and am also grateful that the end-user's experience is so much simpler!

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

AnanthaKancherla — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:03:29 GMT

@JF7 regarding the support for D600 and D820

I work on the Windows graphics team and I wanted to mention that we are working closely with the gpu vendors to get their drivers ready. For Win7 DX9 and above GPUs are tested and supported, even those that only have XP drivers (XDDM). It is harder to guarantee working of drivers for HW that is older than DX9.

The D600 has a ATI Mobile 9000 which is a DX8 class GPU but the Dell D820 comes equipped with a NVIDIA Quadro GPU which is DX9 and has a Vista class driver (WDDM). We do have a driver for this on Windows Update and when this driver is installed Windows+P key combination to project externally should work. Let us know if you have been unable to obtain the D820 driver from WU.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

Mantvydas — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:10:26 GMT

First of all, I wanted to answer sevenflavor, who, it's clearly seen, must haven't used Windows 7 yet.

And Font installation dialog, and Character Map, have been updated in Windows 7 to match Windows 7 style. No more they are the same as it was in Windows 95. And Font previews do include national characters. They were not in Vista. Please confirm your facts first, before posting.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

Mantvydas — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:12:36 GMT

How about some translations which are the same words in English language, but are different in the context in my language (Lithuanian).

Like simple Copying... in a dialog box, which is always the same in English.

If you copy 1 element, you have to say Kopijuojamas. If you copy multiple elements, you have to say Kopijuojami, while in English Copying... stays the same.

More problems of the same dialog box in RC: From: and To: in English is used both in e-mail message header, and in Copying dialog box. In Lithuanian these same two words have to be translated as Nuo: Kam: in e-mail header, and Iš: Į: in copying dialog box.

How do you manage that?

Actually, the latter I already saw as Closed(fixed) in Microsoft Connect website, hopefully that hasn't introduced regression in an e-mail application.

Non-American spelling

Cuppa — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:46:03 GMT

Will Windows ever feature Australian English/British English/Canadian English/etc. 'translations'? That is, 'favourite' rather than 'favorite', 'colour' rather than 'color', and so on and so forth. Surely this would be trivial compared to the work you've described in this post.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

sevenflavor — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:45:02 GMT

@Mantvydas, I never said the *Add Fonts* dialog wasn't updated. I referred to the "Choose font" common dialog which applications like Notepad and formerly WordPad etc used. And Character Map has not been updated since it's 32-bit NT port. Maybe it has been updated under the hood for Unicode 5 support but the UI and usability (especially at high resolutions) need a serious overhaul.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

sevenflavor — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:48:35 GMT

And by the font control panel preview, I mean the one which you get when you right click a font and click "Preview" to view all of its character set.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

Jonathan Stanley — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:01:03 GMT

1st comment and Cuppa beat me to it...

Make MUI available for all, as opposed to locking it down to Ultimate/Enterprise. LIPs are available to all after all (and be installed concurrently with a "master" MUI) and would stop silly situations in the future of a LIP becoming "unavailable" because they got upgraded to MUI status.

Lastly, can there please be an English-English LIP? I made some enquiries in the past (I volunteer in being the moderator, having done similar things in software regarding i18n/L10n management) but just got blanked. English as used in England and thus the UK is also the variant used in the European Union.

How can Windows 7 be "global" when it sidelines half-a-billion users where their variant of English used in official settings is not American English?

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

Jalf — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:44:15 GMT

You're missing one very simple, and very important, feature:

The ability for the user to set a preferred language.

I live in Denmark, so I've set regional settings to Danish, giving me times, dates and numbers formatted as I'd expect. But many apps, including Microsoft ones, take this setting to mean that I prefer applications translated to Danish as well. I don't. I run an English version of Windows for that precise reason. I've seen enough unintelligible translations (again, including some from Microsoft), that I prefer the original language whenever possible.

Games for Windows Live is a prime example of this. It doesn't even give the user the option of choosing a language himself. It just picks a language based on some unspecified setting somewhere in the bowels of Windows. Of course, we could blame GfWL for that (and I do. It is a horrible piece of software in many ways besides this), but it seems the problem would not have occured if Windows had some clear guideline for "when multiple languages are available, this is the one applications should assume the user prefers".

Whether this should be addressed by adding a new API call, exposing new options in the control panel, or just a guideline in prose form in the documentation, it seems like a pretty obvious use-case for localization. "The user might prefer another language than the developer had expected. What do we do?"

All this effort and Windows STILL isn't available in ENGLISH

cauleyflower — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:55:41 GMT

I see others have already posted what I was thinking when I saw this article, but I think it's important to reiterate.

After all the years, and all the effort of adding all these complex non-latin scripts etc., we STILL don't have a version of Windows that is in ENGLISH.

MICROSOFT - GIVE US A VERSION IN STANDARD BLOODY ENGLISH. It will only take you a day of search and replace to fix the most annoying misspellings like Favorite->Favourite, Color->Colour etc.

Thank you, and apologies for shouting.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

JF7 — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:01:25 GMT

@AnanthaKancherla, thank you for your detailed and encouraging reply.

But it does sound as though Microsoft and the GPU manufacturers are writing off DX8-class machines (like the Dell D600) as being too old to care about even though they run Win7 very nicely with 2GB of RAM. When you say "harder to guarantee working of drivers" for DX8 machines, does that really mean that you're not even trying?

All these DX8 people are going to be unhappy as they upgrade to Win7, experience driver problems, like with projectors or dual displays, while they wait and wait and wait for Win7 drivers that may never come. Why can't Microsoft invest 0.0001% of its cash on this to ensure a smooth upgrade from XP to 7?

On the retail side, millions have bought netbooks, but many millions more have simply kept their slightly older machines to be used AS netbooks. On the corp side, we simply can't spend the money now to buy new hardware when the current hardware runs XP perfectly fine and all the XP drivers are good. I personally would love to upgrade all of our laptops to Win7 and send Microsoft more money, but we won't (we can't) if the drivers aren't forthcoming for the "older" machines (which can run Win7 just fine).

Please don't take my response as ingratitude or personal animosity, I am thankful for your response and I hope for the best. But it does sound like you're saying we'll probably never see Win7 drivers for the D600-class machines and that you don't intend to push for them either (Dell certainly won't do it anytime soon), and so I guess we'll keep our XP D600's for years more.

Thank You.

Theme and Localization for India

kkashwin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:00:49 GMT

Hi,

Nice to see that a lot of effort has gone in to providing a wide variety of fonts for Indian Languages...

But am really disappointed to see that there are no localization themes for India... - thought it was a large enough market to provide a separate theme (none of the existing ones even remotely fit!) - I can assure you guys there are enough picturesque places to make wallpapers! :)

--Ashwin

Malayalam Font Kartika

Hashim P M — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 12:16:16 GMT

Wish the new fonts are better than the previous ones, if one goes by the quality of Kart(h)ika which is very unlike Malayalam and devoid of any aesthetic merit. In fact despite the best intentions of creating an original typeface, it ends up being an insult to the language.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

cjmc — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 08:22:41 GMT

I would really appreciate a version of Windows that properly supports British, Australian and New Zealand English spellings.

Firefox, Gmail and many other applications support the hundreds of millions of people who don't use US English. Why can't Microsoft?

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

Behodar — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:07:01 GMT

Here's another "vote" for an English version.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

paulmorriss — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:56:41 GMT

Interesting that mdsn doesn't use Passport for logging in.

Thanks for that update on Windows seven (7).

Multiple non-Unicode languages

phschmidt — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:19:49 GMT

It is extremely annoying to have to keep switching between non-Unicode languages, including the reboot. And that is because Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and English are all that concern me. Wonder how those who have to deal with more than that must feel.

There should be some sort of option, either at install time, through the shortcut or at the executable (as is the compatibility mode), to set it instead of the current global setting.

It is understandable that auto detecting the character coding is asking too much, however allowing for it to be set manually and independently on a per program basis is not.

I would also like to mention that the only Japanese input currently working fine at my test system is through the IME keyboard layer. My native hiragana/katakana keyboard is not working, even properly configured and identified as a Japanese keyboard.

Possible Windows Live Photo Gallery bug when attaching to email

scandib — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:24:36 GMT

I've found what might be a bug, not sure. In Windows Live Photo Gallery, when attaching files to an email, selecting Medium (1024 x 768) is supposed to attach a file of approximately 230 KB. In fact, however, the attached photo (in Outlook) is only 22 KB. Selecting Large (1280 x 1024) is supposed to create a file size of 384, and the resulting attachment is in fact 370, so that appears to work properly.

How about pre-order UK Ultimate pricing given the lack of MUI in non Ultimate Windows 7?

Syllopsium — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:55:05 GMT

Microsoft is currently about to start the pre-order Windows 7 offers in the UK - but only for Home Premium and Professional.

Given that MUI is only in Ultimate, how about Ultimate pre-order pricing?

I want to learn Russian, so would prefer a copy of Windows 7 with both English and Russian interfaces.

It really is a bit daft that it's not included in the offer. Might I perhaps suggest 150 quid for Ultimate as opposed to 100 quid for Professional?

Also, I'd love to have the option for UK English translation, too. IBM used to do that, why can't Microsoft?

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

Mike Williams — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:05:08 GMT

English locales outside of the US are more-or-less invisible in Microsoft, completely taken for granted. So many bugs appear in MS progs when you set a non-US English locale that wouldn't occur if the locale was non-English. From experience that often comes about from MS programmers simply assuming English=US in their coding.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

Mike Williams — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:09:48 GMT

[Splitting this into two as there appears to be an unpublished character count limit for this comment box]

Firstly, +1 for making MUIs available in editions other than Ultimate. If you've ever had your laptop repaired overseas and had a foreign version of Windows slapped on it then you know the pain.

It would help if more internationally-aware people were working on the Windows betas. It's not a matter of language so much as culture: to date they seem to be so US-centric that they cannot read any situation except in US terms.

How are MUI LP and LIP created?

Syllopsium — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:09:32 GMT

MSDN has no detail. It looks very much like a LP is a Microsoft only process. A LIP has a number of limitations.

I would guess that sadly the chance of a British English language pack (and it would have to be a full language pack - again, a LIP's scope is limited) is close to zero, even if people outside Microsoft were to volunteer.

Is there a solution to this, Microsoft? It shouldn't be /that/ much of an undertaking compared to a radically different language, even given the extremely large number of resources to examine. It wouldn't be a quick process though, to do a proper job..

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

cauleyflower — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:42:08 GMT

@ Mike Williams

You say that there could be extra bugs caused specifically by an non-US English locale due to there being an internal mindset within Microsoft hat English = US.

I'm not sure if that is accurate or not, but assuming it is, surely if they just made the bold move and actually introduced an international English locale then they would be *forced* to stop having this internal US mindset. I, for one, would not mind some teething bugs - they will eventually be fixed.

On a slightly different note, I have to laugh at the Office 2010 introduction videos. Every presenter described it as "Office two-thousand-ten", when outside the US that would sound strange - "two-thousand-AND-ten" would sound more normal - they should just be pronouncing it "Office twenty-ten" to sound the most international.

A similar amusing example is with the launch of Windows Vista. Microsoft claimed that one of the reasons that the name was chosen was because it had a clear meaning and was only able to be pronounced in one way. Well, in the US that might be true, where the word is often seen on signs at the sides of the road for a "Vista point". In the UK "vista" can be found in dictionaries, however, the word itself is very rarely used, with such roadside points usually being described as a "panoramic viewing point". I have also heard various different pronunciations of "vista" in the UK - some with the first syllable rhyming with "miss" and others with the first syllable rhyming with "me"!!

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

Mike Williams — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 03:49:48 GMT

@ Cauleyflower

I think your point is that if there is an International English localized edition then perhaps formal testing would be done on it that picked up the international sufficiency bugs.

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

Alun Jones — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:31:19 GMT

I hate to sound all nerdy, but +1 on the suggestion to have an English version of Windows.

As an Englishman living in the US, I accept that I have to make some concessions to speaking the local version of English (or at least understand it), but I remember how irritated I felt when working in the UK, at the "language switch" I had to make whenever I turned on the computer.

It's also worth noting that (in some undefinable way) use of software in the UK is very different from its use in the US. I've worked on tech support in both countries, and there have been several occasions when I've remarked on the different nature of bugs found by each country's customers.

[In general, Americans seem to be more tolerant of bugs, as long as it looks pretty, whereas the rest of the world likes to have the program working properly, even if occasionally a menu drifts in the wrong direction. Brits are clearly C programmers, because our first floor is the one above the ground floor.]

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

TimOR — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:12:02 GMT

I would really like Windows to feature International English spelling and not just American English spelling. This feature has been MISSING FOR YEARS from the English language version of Windows.

I note this article is rather selective in detailing the language support

Syllopsium — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:15:18 GMT

It may seem marginally churlish to look a gift horse in the mouth, and a little mean to complain when after all the hard work has finally resulted in Windows 7 going to GA/RTM.

However, it's not really 36 languages, is it? It wasn't in Vista, and it isn't now. It's actually eight.

The remainder are 'partially' translated, as I discovered when I tried to load the Russian language pack on Vista and found lots of the interface (including Internet Explorer and Windows update, for instance) is still in English.

Perusing MSDN reveals this has not changed for Window 7.

It only applies to Unicode, too, so if the apps are creakily non Unicode aware they'll be displayed in the system locale - which can't be changed on a per user basis.

It looks like if you want a proper interface customised to a particular country, it still involves downloading applications only for that country..

It's good progress has been made, but can this actually be done properly for Windows 8?

OK, So IE is updated from Windows update

Syllopsium — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:26:06 GMT

Provided a manual update scan is run. Most of my points still stand, though.

Still, if some of Microsoft's apps are less than optimal, much of the competition is positively archaic. Language packs on many current generation applications is pretty much bleeding edge..

re: Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market

California Drivers Education — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:33:49 GMT