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Startup Hopes To Crowd-Source the Developing World
GalaticGrub writes "Technology Review has an article about a startup that wants to build a business out of crowd-sourcing the developing world. The company, called txteagle, seems to be interested mainly in using local knowledge to translate information into less common languages. The Finnish cell-phone company Nokia is a partner in the project, and CEO Nathan Eagle says that it provides a good example of a Western company that could benefit from txteagle workers. Eagle explains that Nokia is interested in 'software localization,' or translating its software for specific regions of a country. 'In Kenya, there are over 60 unique, fundamentally different languages,' he says. 'You're lucky to get a phone with a Swahili interface, but even that might be somebody's third language. Nokia would love to have phones for everyone's mother tongues, but it has no idea how to translate words like "address book" into all of these languages.'"
What would Microsoft do if, due to the economy, individual users forgo upgrading to Windows 7, and decide to keep what they have. Will Microsoft go and say, "XP is old and we won't be supporting it anymore. Also, by the way, VISTA will only be supported for another year."
At that point, Microsoft would alienate users of previous versions of Windows, the users will decide that they need to choose something else, and a large corporation ends up loosing a large chunk of the marketplace.
I would say that Microsoft needs to test the waters prior to dropping support for XP, otherwise people that could decide to upgrade after the ecomony improves would end up getting comfortable with whatever alternate they end up choosing and tell Microsoft that they're not coming back!