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#1
Hi there in Redmond.
Please let me tell you about something that might surprise you: In modern times, quite a many of us are living ex-pat life abroad, using Windows and its applications in another language than the official language(s) of our adoptive countries.
But wait, shouldn't you know this already? I think yes, you should, but apparently you do not. As I think I am a good example of ex-pat users I am talking about, I will tell you something about my struggle with Windows localization.
Coming from a bilingual environment I have two mother tongues, Finnish and Swedish. I live and work in Germany speaking German home with my wife and neighbors but using English as my main language, both at work and among my personal friends. All my computers at home and at work, mainly Windows rigs but also a few Macs and Novell Suse Linux machines, have the same "language and location" settings: Display language English, input language Finnish (its layout allows me to type all four languages without constantly switching layout), location UK & formats UK (only changing the £ sign to €).
Although speaking and reading almost perfect German (official government tests, best possible result for a non-native speaker), I do prefer using English in my mainly UK-US-Irish-Scandinavian social circles. Instead of German dubbed TV I follow Scandinavian and UK TV with original audio tracks and only go to the movies in selected theaters showing original versions instead of typical German dubbed ones. Over 90% of books, magazines and newspapers I read are in English, Swedish or Finnish.
That's enough background information. Why do you geeks in Redmond not understand that there are quite a many people like me, working and / or living abroad? Why does Bing in a new Windows 8.1 installation with English display language and location set to England by default show German search results? Why do so many Microsoft websites default to German pages, why can't you make a simple change in system and tell Windows and all its apps that wherever the IP shows the computer physically is, if the display language is not that of the country of the physical location, then all apps, web pages and services etc. should use the language user has selected? If the location set by user does not match with the physical location, it should automatically mean that all location based services should use the location selected by the user, not the physical location.
Simple: Let user select in which language he / she wants all information, understand that not every user here in Germany uses German as main language, no more than for instance an American in China uses Chinese. Let user in Australia to get his / her news from India if so chosen by selecting location India.
Also your online services should remember these things. Next time my Outlook.com shows everything in German when I use it on an Internet café with their PC I might just close that account and open a Gmail account instead; I have set my Outlook.com service to use English and it's this my personal selection you should offer me, you should not check in which country the PC is and offer the service using that language. The localized online services should always check which language user has selected in his / her settings.
You have already taken a step on right direction with Windows 8: now I do not need to get a specific business edition of Windows to be able to use language packs, Windows 8 offers this possibility in every edition. Earlier it was always a pain you know where to buy a PC here with a German edition of Windows preinstalled, then order an English one online (surprisingly many vendors did not order an English install media for you even if you offered some extra money).
Don't panic, you are not the worst. There are big companies doing it even more annoyingly, automatically redirecting to German pages here, to Dutch pages in the Netherlands and to Finnish pages in Finland, allowing to open pages in other languages only when a foreign proxy is used.
Please do not decide for me which language I should use!
Yours, Kari