Global by Design

Sun says that it localize its StarOffice software suite into five additional languages over the next year, which will include Russian, Polish and Dutch. The software is currently available in 11 languages.
StarOffice costs a great deal less than Microsoft’s Office suite, which makes it particularly appealing in an emerging market like Russia. While Microsoft’s Office [...]

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Richard Koman for SiliconValley Watcher writes about the potential of Gmail in developing markets.
The greatest reason why I think Gmail has a good shot at popular usage is Google’s expertise at localizing the platform for developing markets. I don’t expect Microsoft to localize Outlook for Bihari, Tonga or Swahili anytime soon, but Google is [...]

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Localization industry organization LISA has posted an interesting Q&A with Ori Redler, co-founder of software vendor RedleX, which has developed a word processing application for the Mac that supports such “minority” languages as Welsh, Farsi and Hebrew. Not only does the software take Unicode support to the next level, it does so at an affordable [...]

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The Wall Street Journal documents Microsoft’s efforts to profit from developing markets while battling piracy.
As I’ve mentioned before, Microsoft’s response over the past decade to a piracy-prone market has been to simply ignore that market. That is, until Linux came along. Now Microsoft is selling a scaled-down, less expensive operating system referred to as [...]

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Red Hat Linux is now avaailable in Bangla (also known as Bengali). Bangla is the official language of Bangladesh, a country with more than 140 million people. Why Bangla you ask?
Because a growing number of programmers in India and Bangladesh want software in their native tongue. And, more important, because Microsoft has so far largely [...]

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While Microsoft focuses on its “strategic markets” the rest of the world is making do with open source software. And they’re doing quite well, thank you very much.
There is now an OpenOffice software package available in Swahili. According to the release:

Swahili is the most spoken of the Bantu languages and conservative estimates indicate that is [...]

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The iTunes Canada store is now up and running. That makes it a total of 14 local iTunes stores now available. Here is a screen shot of the iTunes global gateway:

Just four stores were live in September. Talk about rapid globalization.A Japan iTunes store is in the works, but that country won’t be as simple [...]

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A great article about the growth of blogging in China. Chinese also happens to be the fastest-growing language on the Internet.

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Just when I thought I’d seen every type of search engine, along comes Babelplex. Babelplex takes a search string, translates it into another language and searches on both languages at once.
Its name comes from the Web-based machine translation software, Babel Fish.
Click here to search on “Web globalization” in English and Chinese.
This could be a [...]

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According to News.com, Apple is launching iTunes for Japan in March 2005.
As I reported a few weeks agoiTunes is already localized for 12 European markets. Japan, however, will not be quite so simple due to the inevitable character set challenges.
Also, here are my initial thoughts of how effectively Apple is localizing each store.

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