The Cadware Group and Localization

...or War Stories on the Localization Front

I once worked for a now defunct start up, The Cadware Group, Ltd., that suffered from having software that could not easily be ported into the Japanese market. I know that it at least required a lot of manual labor and added time to find hard coded strings and replace them with variables that could be read from resource files. I wasn't directly involved in the coding for that project, but I recall that it did require some re factoring to work in the Japanese market.

This was back in the days of MS-DOS and OS/2. I recall that Windows 3.0 was alive then.

Hammering Home the Value of Global Built Software

Android Apps Are Priced Higher in Europe Than In The U.S.

Although Europe just represents 20% market share for the Android market, it would benefit software authors to price their products in local currency to reap higher profits. This hammers home the value proposition for writing Android apps which are global aware and which can be easily localized into different locales.

In many of my projects both as tester and as developer, I spent a fair bit of time making sure that my product could be taken into markets outside of the U.S. I know that Microsoft earns a great deal of its profits from international markets.