Microsoft, Apple and Google - Approaching wrongly to Internationalization & Localization

Take list of top most valuable brands in the world or talk about top most innovative companies; Apple, Google and Microsoft will be among top 10 companies of any list. Microsoft ruled the world in 1990s and Google rose in 2000s. Apple rose at the same time as Google but growth of Apple exceeded that of Google. Today these three great companies are competing and collaborating simultaneously. These companies are making strategic investments to beat each other. All this is boon to customers as it gives choice and value to customers.

But that's not the point that I want to put forward today. Visit iOS 7 launch page and see features are country dependent - http://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability.

Why are these features country dependent? There are few chosen ones get all features, rest of the world gets these features later. It’s not the problem for Apple to solve. It’s the problem for all three companies that are approaching to internationalization & Localization. I believe that these companies should work towards creating a platform where local developers can publish their information to provide custom experience.  Think about a Siri or Google now where you speak: "top news" and Siri or Google now pulls news from TOI if you like TOI or from HT if you like HT. Same way when we search on “weather in Hyderabad”, we get weather from some weather websites. Can I choose providers of my choice? Can I get information from local providers such as Jagran.com? We can but Google has to go and tie up with every local providers. Humanly it’s not possible and that's why it makes sense to create a platform to develop localized experience.

Google search made world democratic, liberal and free. Due to Google's fair algorithm of search, many new businesses came into existence as cost of entry and discovery was reduced.  Windows did it as a computing platform. By launching App store on iOS, Apple made cost of entry really low for developers. So, what stops these great innovators to come up with a new platform for localization? I can think of three reasons for this closed approach:

1.  It’s not an easy problem to create open and flexible platform that supports all languages and cultures. 

2. Companies see more value in services than platforms and that's why everybody is focused on developing new services instead of creating a platform

3. World's business is shifting towards non-English markets but biggest pie still comes from English market especially from US. That's why non-English markets get ignored in large scale of things.

I believe it’s the time to think internationalization and localization in a new way and develop mobile and web platforms flexible enough for third party developers to integrate their services.