by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/11/19 20:53 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/11/19/1106351.aspx
A long, long time ago in a blog post far away (well, okay, I mean What is my locale? Which locale do you mean? from February of 2005), reader Jonathan Payne had some less-than-happy thoughts about the locale setup in XP or those in England and the potential problems in Vista going forward -- here and here.
He had a good point -- things were being made a lot harder than they had to be....
But it was very nice to see a comment sent to me earlier today from Jonathan:
A while ago I posted a rant on your blog commenting on how tedious installing Windows can be.
I installed Vista and I just wanted to say how impressed I was. The new installer is a big improvement over the previous version.
Thanks to you and everyone else at Microsoft.
That is always good to hear. Hopefully we will manage to keep on getting better (and even more hopefully, there will be lots of positive feelings now that Vista has been installed!).
If I may be so bold, I'll suggest that one of the really big reasons that the experience is better is a big effort that was done by folks on the GIFT team working in cooperation with several others to try to make the setup experience more internationally seamless. And this isn't me patting myself on the back; other than helping answer a few specific questions and a few comments in bugs this is entirely work done by people on my team and our neighboring MUI/typography teams.
Good job, people on the GIFT team! Another satisfied customer....
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Jon Payne on 20 Nov 2006 5:42 AM:
Also, with this change a lot more users will be running with the correct regional settings so more people will benefit from the work your team are doing.
Michael S. Kaplan on 20 Nov 2006 5:48 AM:
An excellent point, Jon. :-)
The more accurate we can help people be here, the more likely they will get results they expect....
(I shudder to think about people using new Vista locales (e.g. Tibetan or Sinhalese) without setting user locale properly and cursing our poor collation support since it was never actually set correctly! So the easier it is for the settings to be right, the better!)