Hindi trends!!

[drbiohealth]

"This announcement comes after the success of the Hindi version of its Window XP starter edition."

http://news.moneycontrol.com/india/news/business/microsoftwindowxp/microsoftwindowsxpgoingmultilingual/market/stocks/article/220981

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/7097_1720598,008700010014.htm

[Rubber Duck]

"This announcement comes after the success of the Hindi version of its Window XP starter edition."

http://news.moneycontrol.com/india/news/business/microsoftwindowxp/microsoftwindowsxpgoingmultilingual/market/stocks/article/220981

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/7097_1720598,008700010014.htm

Thanks for the update!

[drbiohealth]

This is old stuff (perhaps 2000 around), however it gives some interesting insights.

Media companies must focus on all four language groups

From Guardian

Mr James Murdoch, the youngest son of media magnate Mr Rupert Murdoch,
warned yesterday that English will not become the language of the
Internet by default.

Speaking at a television festival in Edinburgh, Mr Murdoch, an
executive vice-president of his father's News Corp who also runs the
Asian pay-television business Star TV, said that while English remains
a key language employed by Internet users, others are on the increase,
such as Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish.

If media companies want to compete in the global marketplace, he said,
they must focus on all four language groups.

"These four audiences, each boasting generally global distribution, are
and will continue to be utterly dominant in terms of total market size."

He pointed to research carried out in the United States which predicted
that although half current Internet users are American, that figure
would drop to one third by 2004.

He said that Goldman Sachs, the investment bankers, estimated that
there would be 96.6 million Internet users in China by 2002.

Mandarin, he pointed out, is the most commonly spoken language with 835
million speakers, followed by English with 470 million, Spanish at 330
million and Hindi with 300 million.

In the US and Britain, he said, "the notion of cultural imperialism
marches onward, unaware of surging non-English markets, or worse, quite
aware of them but still believing that the lingua franca of the modern
age is and will continue to be English.

"It is true that English has been the predominant language of the
Internet so far, and it is true that it will always be a major force
but as connectivity penetrates deeper into the massive market outside
Europe and the US ... English will decline in use through this medium."
English would not become the "default language" of the digital world.

He pointed to the success of the hit game show Who Wants to be a
Millionaire? around the world, in particular in India.

The success of the show, he said, demonstrated that international media
groups must tailor their products to different markets.