Reply to post: Re: In the 1980's there was one Desktop OS. In the 1990's there were two..

Re: In the 1980's there was one Desktop OS. In the 1990's there were two..

Spent most of my time in US but first commercial product I shipped (1985) was for leading UK software house that supported eight languages. Been doing internalization since the very beginning.

Until Win 95 fundamentally changed the market the revenue numbers for personal computer software sales (non games ) was 50% US, 25% Japan, 25% Europe. That was from early 1980's to mid 1990's. UK was biggest single European market (by revenue) at almost 10% some years.

European and Japanese software titles rarely succeed outside home area. (Except games). US products did. If you were not in the games business that mean most product categories were US first. Then you did the Japanese version if the market was not locked up by local company. Then it might be worth your while to do a French language version. Then maybe German. All other European language localization was generally done by local distributor. The reason why you had local language small time successes products on fringe platforms back then is only because it was not worth the while of the segment dominant (US) companies doing a port or localized version. A lot of very expensive work for very small SKU sales. So worth our while to leave the crumbs to some small local company.

Europe unlike Japan was never a big enough market to support lots of MacOS localized products. Even though the OS supported easy internationalization. Once Win95 took off in Europe and took all MS/DOS market share then the equation changed and it was finally worth doing localized versions. Even though Win OS support was flaky. Especially in Japaneses. Win95J - the worst OS MS ever shipped...