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.
