Monday, July 4, 2005

Don't Look Cross-eyed at the Turkish i

Boy, I sah-crewed da pooch with that offhand Turkish "i" comment. A'ight. I know how to back-pedal and regroup and try to come up with a lucid, compelling defense of what I was thinking...

Nope, can't do it. I typed and I typed and I typed and it just sounded like myopic drivel that I only half-believed in myself. Maybe even I'm succumbing to fatigue.

The issue is that I'm frustrated by the loss of mainstream features that have to be cut in order to code and test against hard international features that will have a marginal return-on-investment at the expense of cutting something that Fortune 500 companies would be delighted to see and deploy. Our competitors don't sim-ship in all those languages and it is an opening for them to establish competitive ground.

Return-on-investment. Balancing features vs. international markets is sort of a knap-sack problem, except when done right, you empty the sack and get increased deployment and adoption, which translates into cool, crisp cash. That problem is not best represented by a vector of "i"s but something much more complex that I doubt any of us will agree upon. Personally, I'm fighting right today for the decisions that will have Microsoft actually shipping product NOW and putting down a foundation to grow into for the next decade.

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