Steve Jobs, MS Office, Israel, and a basic feature Microsoft took 13 years to install You know the cliches: software is always late, and some features take longer to implement than others. The software feature you’re about to read about has only taken 13 years to implement, and turned out to be one of the most politically explosive we’ve ever covered. Cast your mind back to the beginning of 2002. Apple was in …
"how on earth did Zulu end up with a Roman alphabet?"
The usual reason is that they didn't already have an written form of their language and were eventually given one by a passing missionary - in much the same way that a monk named Cyril provided the Russians (and a few others) with his take on how their spoken languages should be written down.
Y'all _have_ heard of the Anglo-Zulu War, 1879, haven't you? Rorke's Drift and all that? 11 Victoria Crosses ring a bell? Hollyweird made a movie of it, didn't screw it up too badly, was the first movie Michael Caine was in. At the end they paid Richard Burton to reel off the names of the 11 VC winners while 'Men of Harlech' ran in the background. After Rorke's Drift and the massive defeat of Ulundi, the Zulus were in the British Empire whether they wanted to be or not. (They didn't.) They got the Latin alphabet same way pretty much everyone else in Africa got it: at cannonpoint.
Back in the day when Big Red was much Smaller Red, I was lucky(!!)) enough to be part of a team that put one of the first Oracle Manufacturing systems in the UK. (for the interested [if any,] Forms 2.3, Applications 6.3.8, Oracle DB V6). In those days it was all character based and we had a "Quickpick" that displayed in the wrong order, oldest to newest, we needed it the other way round. They (big red) kindly provided a resource at the cost of a day's work, to fix it for us, And their rates were as exorbitant then as they are now. Less than a month later, we worked out how to do this ourselves, takes approx 10 minutes to do it Properly, 2 minutes in a rush.
The moral?? NEVER listen to the big boys when they say it will cost X millions of $ or £, actual cost probably < 1% of quote ( after all our offices have to impress!!).
They are a bit like statistics, in that 98.73798% of them are fake. Or lack rigour, or can be approached in several ways, some wronger than others.
A bit like hypothesis testing and ANOVA may tell you one thing, but simply plotting the data in a graphic and looking at it will tell you a very different story, it so happens with business cases that, while a simple, conventional calculation may discourage a certain course of action, often common sense and the ability to look at the wider picture will suggest otherwise.
From various bits that I've read on the web, I get the impression that Word's innards are a massive mess, something possibly justified in its early days when memory and CPU constraints were more of an issue, but not a good state of affairs for a product which presumably is intended to be long-lived.
Therefore, RTL support could and perhaps should have been viewed in the context of cleaning up and generally improving the code base so as to reduce maintenance costs in the future (never mind performance and stuff like that, but that may not save you money or get you extra customers). Saying "Middle Eastern Office on Mac users are a tiny market" is narrow minded to the point of incompetence (if that's how the story actually went).
Written RTL but a transliterated germanic language!
Yiddish גוּט טַק אִים בְּטַגְֿא שְ וַיר דִּיש מַחֲזוֹר אִין בֵּיתֿ הַכְּנֶסֶתֿ טְרַגְֿא
Transliterated gut tak im betage se vaer dis makhazor in beis hakneses trage
Translated May a good day come to him who carries this prayer book into the synagogue.
(from Wikipaedia)
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