At 10:43 AM -0700 8/4/97, Lori Brownell wrote:
[snip]
>NT5 will provide you full multilingual capabilities. You will be able
>to run any, or all, of the FE IMEs on any language version of NT5. This
>will not require you to purchase or download anything additional.
>Everything that you need will be on every language version of the NT5
>CDs.
>
>Lori Brownell <loribr@microsoft.com>
>Senior Program Manager - Windows NT
>Microsoft Corp.
Lori,
Could you make sure that all the UTC members (incl. alternates) are on
the list of beta testers? (Any one who is willing to be, that is.) How
about making them alpha testers?
Since I'm *not* a UTC member, this is only self-serving in the sense
that I would really like this multilingual support to work as promised
from the very first NT5 unit shipped. Having seen i18n features thrown
overboard, like so much ballast, by MS in the past (unicode in Win95,
for example), I'd really like to avoid hearing "well, there were some
problems that we couldn't adequately address at the last minute, so we
decided to wait and ship it as part of NT 5.1, due out in a year or
two...." The sooner those problems are found in the beta (or alpha!)
cycle, the lower the probability that they will end up on the "deferred"
problem list when you finally decide that the time has come to ship the
product.
If just seems to me that a fully Unicode-based OS, with real
implementations instead of just stubs behind its text APIs, C, J, & K
fonts and good input systems included on *all* versions, and the ability
to run any localized version of any app on any version of the OS just
sounds too wonderful to be true.
I'd like to see this promise kept, but the fact that I have *never*
heard this promise included in the laundry list of upcoming NT5 features
touted in the trade magazines makes me wonder how high on MS's list of
priorities it is, and how willing to jettison it they might become when
it comes time to ship. Finding the problems sooner rather than later
might increase its chances of survival.
Thanks,
__Glen__
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