Shipment of International Products

Glossary

• Simultaneous ship, or "sim ship": The release of localized editions of a product at the same time as or soon after the domestic edition is released, usually within 30 days.
• Release delta: The time between the release of the domestic product and the release of the localized edition.

You can take one of two approaches to shipping international products. The first is to begin working on international editions after the domestic edition has been released or when it is almost finished. The second is to plan for international products in advance, work on several language editions concurrently, and ship them all at roughly the same time.

Those who would advocate the first method fail to realize how much effort it takes to create localized software. If it were an easy task, the text would be only a few screens long. A common argument from development managers is, "Our domestic product is really important. We don't want to delay the domestic product or distract the team by worrying about the international editions now." This short-term, restricted thinking makes sense only for companies that generate 95 percent of their revenue domestically or that have no international competitors. In other words, very few companies benefit from this strategy.

Microsoft's careful attention to its internationalization practices is the reason it earns the majority of its revenue outside the United States. Companies that make most of their revenue domestically either ship products with a domestic focus, such as financial software or certain multimedia titles, or they haven't tapped the potential of the international market. Because controlling costs has a significant impact on profits, the main argument against delaying work on international editions of a program is that to delay such work is expensive.

One effective approach, and the one used by Microsoft to develop Windows, is to create a solid internationalized core code base and to begin translation work as soon as there is something to translate. Microsoft develops the English, German, and Japanese editions of its operating systems in-house and in parallel—English because it is the largest language market for Windows and because most of the developers on the Windows team are native English speakers; German because it is the largest European-language market and serves as a good test for European-language functionality and ease of translation; and Japanese because the Far East is an important market (Microsoft's second-largest) and Japanese serves as a good basis for all Far Eastern language development issues. Other language editions, such as Italian and Swedish, are translated in parallel at Microsoft's subsidiary in Ireland. Teams in both Ireland and Redmond, Washington, worked furiously to ensure that localized editions of Windows NT and Windows 95 were ready for testing at each major development milestone.

This method of developing international software is easier to implement if all developers are held accountable for the international functionality and localizability of their own features. Naturally, having an internationally conscious team that constructs several language editions of a product in parallel with minimal problems is an ideal that might take more than one product cycle to fully achieve. The key is to begin early in each new product cycle. Early translation, for example, can uncover design blunders before complex features have been built around them. Coding problems can then be resolved while the code is still fresh in developers' minds.

The best result of a "three-pronged" development approach, such as Microsoft's simultaneous development of English, German, and Japanese editions, is simultaneous shipment of more than one language edition. The Windows NT 3.5 team, for example, released the French, German, Spanish and US editions of its product within days of one another. A "four-pronged" approach, such as the one summarized in Figure 1-6 below, would include either a right-to-left language, such as Arabic, or a European language that does not use Latin script, such as Russian.

The international press pays attention whenever a new product revision reaches the market. Having more than one language edition ready when the domestic edition is released allows more than one language edition to take advantage of the publicity surrounding the new revision. Not having key language editions ready soon after the domestic release means that international customers will wait for the revised localized releases rather than buy the existing localized releases. The longer they have to wait, the more frustrated they become, and the more sales your company loses.

You will not significantly delay your domestic product if you work toward international functionality from the beginning of your product cycle; you will actually save your company time and money in the long run. Inventing a productwide plan that satisfies all internationalization requirements—timely domestic and international releases, inexpensive localization, a compelling set of new features, and appropriate staffing—can be a balancing act. But without a plan and your team's commitment to it, producing international editions of your product will turn into one headache after another.

Figure 1-6 Sample "four-pronged" approach, designed to uncover potential problems in international software early in the development process.

If your product team has already produced localized editions but they have long release deltas, the principles in this book can help you shorten the release deltas for your next product revision. In some cases, a new product plan might schedule localized releases of Product Two within months of localized editions of Product One. If this happens, suspend localization of Product One and concentrate on shipping international editions of Product Two quickly. Microsoft, for example, did not release a Japanese edition of Microsoft Visual Basic 3, but went straight from localizing Visual Basic 2 to localizing the version of Visual Basic that will follow Visual Basic 3.