by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2012/05/23 16:07 +02:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/05/23/10308554.aspx
No, the title of this blog is not any sort of riddle!
Almost no Dutchman (or for that matter Dutchwoman!) ever voluntarily uses the "Dutch" keyboard.
You know, this keyboard:
They really don't like it.
Not even a little bit.
Not even at all!
What they do largely prefer is the United States - International keyboard.
This keyboard.
Simple enough, right?
Well, I've been listening to people working in this space for a while.
For about 13 years now, though modifying it for how mind-numbing the complaints might be it seems more like 113 years.
They complain about how weird it is to have a United States - International keyboard layout attached to Dutch!
Sometimes customers get weird about it after our UI kind of thrust it at them when it used to be so often hidden to them, as I mentioned in Keyboard UI in setup hoist by its own petard?.
But anyway, people got over it each time.
Some of them still never saw it, but knew that was the layout they liked.
Anyway, if you looked across all places people use Windows, the % of locales using it according to SQM data is interesting, for several reasons:
| Location | % of use |
| Brazil | 21.4 |
| United States | 19.5 |
| Netherlands | 15.8 |
| Poland | 5.7 |
| Mexico | 4.2 |
| Romania | 3.8 |
| Czech Republic | 3.2 |
| Hungary | 2.5 |
| Argentina | 2.1 |
| Colombia | 1.9 |
| Other | 19.9 |
First of all, it is ironic that of all of those locations have the UnitedStates - International keyboard specified as one of the LOCALE_SKEYBOARDSTOINSTALL except for the two locales located in that region -- English - United States and Spanish - United States.
Second of all, is interesting that such a large percentage of the people who include it explicitly are in the US, though one may have to run other queries to eliminate the many machines located in the US that run with other language settings to decide whether that number is truly interesting or not.
Third of all, of those top ten countries that use this keyboard, only half of them (and 31% of them) are regions that are even remotely likely to care about the Euro, at ALTGR+E:
Though of course 31% is certainly enough to make it worthwhile!
Of course given what the blog about I referenced pointed out, we may never know how many people learned of this through >= Vista OOBE or Windows 8, who may never have minded changing the name before the UI made it so prominent....
Just imagine if they'd listen back in 2006 and fixed that bug! :-)
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