One Uyghur walked into a Blog, and...

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/11/25 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/11/25/10095782.aspx

The title sounds almost like it might be the beginning of a joke, but it's not. This really happened!

I should explain.

You see, just a couple of days ago, a reader with the handle One Uyghur wrote the following in the Suggestion Box:

Dear Michael Kaplan,

How can we have Uyghur (Uighur) LIPs for Microsoft products? How does Microsoft develop the LIPs for some local languages? If we help Microsoft to translate the terminology into our language, will Microsoft release the LIPs for us? Help us to use Microsoft products in our language.

Thank you.

One Uyghur

Now this was not the only way the messasge got to me.

Many other comments were posted in another, unrelated blog (A lot of LIPs for South Africa!) that expanded on the "Uyghur LIP" topic by making arguments about relative population sizes, though I ended up deleting those since three of those comments with no end in sight concerned me about topicality a bit. No offense, but I do reserve the right blah blah blah....

If you were wondering whether the One Uyghur handle seemed familiar, there were earlier comments in other blogs? You were right. There was The inappropriate nature of getting the Feh out of Uighur, Windows 7 edition and The report of the need for a Uyghur hotfix may be an overstatement. They were about other issues though.

For the LIP question itself, the topic is one actually I discussed recently -- less than a month ago, in Why one LIP and not another?, such as:

• the fact that individual user requests aren't really the way such things can be decided;
• the near irrelevance of the pure "number of speakers" issue;
• the need for some kind of "sponsorship" or other information to help quantify the business case;

all of which of course apply here.

Now I like my blog, most of the time.

My management kind of likes it too, for the most part (I appreciate this a lot, since it hasn't always been true!).

It was less than a month ago in a team meeting when -- in a round-the-room intro I gave my name and mentioned I had an "annoying but lovable" Blog -- my manager's manager's manager (Corporate VP Julie Larson-Green) agreed with the assessment and smiled.

Hopefully more about the loveable part than the annoying part, of course. My return smile was just as warm as hers, but a bit more nervous! :-)

Anyway, in making decisions about whether to assign the resources to translate the resources of up to 20% of Windows into a given language? This Blog is clearly not where such things are determined, or how. Even on the occasions where I have responsibilities to assist others who are making those type of determinations, this Blog is an entirely separate part of my job. My contribution there is more on the technical side anyway, not on the business case proper (i.e. much more on the "can we do it?" than the "should we do it?" side).

But I will forward this information on, since that never hurts. Besides, people who make contact like this can often make good beta testers for this or anything related later. :-)

However, one can't lose sight of the fact that all of this (Windows) is a business to some of the people here (even if not me personally most of the time), and therefore a standard process has to be used to be sure that decisions and actions and implementations are proper and useful and appropriate....

In this specific case, for not just friend One Uyghur but for All Uyghurs!

Uyghur boy on 29 Jun 2012 7:32 AM:

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