International product development

I've been in Redmond for two years now--basically a lifetime--and finally had a real chat with my old friend John McConnell, who I've known since Apple days. I wanted mostly to just catch up of course, but my excuse was to tell him about all the progress we've had lately in Portugal.

We share a mutual friend from Japan, Hasami Hasegawa, who John knows from the days when they were together at DEC; I know him from when I worked in Apple Japan.

John's career has mostly focused on things International, and he knows a lot about localization. Lately he's been working hard with the Windows localization team putting the final touches on Vista. Localization used to be a bigger deal than it is today, and at Apple Japan I met many people who made their living by taking U.S. software and converting it to other languages. It's real hard, maybe impossible to make money that way anymore. Just about every language, certainly every "easy ones", is addressed with the Windows APIs.

By the way, I heard something else recently about Vista Starter Edition. For some reason I had heard that SE wasn't selling well, and that unfortunately the forces of piracy were too strong to beat with a low-end version of the O.S.  Well it turns out that's not true, and in fact the SE people are excited to be expanding to more countries. Apparently it was a huge hit in Brazil, where we finally learned how to better market and sell it, so now there are plans for lots more Starters.