> I hope NI stops wasting money on localized versions of LabVIEW
> and keeps the money for important things such as features &
> performance & stability.
Given that the localized versions are a substantial part of our business, we would have less money for performance and stability if we didn't spend money on localization. They easily make back the investment.
Mathieu_T: I am trying to find someone to answer your question about 64-bit French and the feasibility of getting such a release.
TiTou:
> Are you assuming that those who purchase a localized LabVIEW would not make the purchase if LabVIEW was only available in english?
Far more than assuming. We know our sales would be considerably less, as indicated by the sharp upticks we see when we release in a new language. I assure you it's a lot more than a marketing bullet. 🙂
On the perf/stability front, how's your LV 2011 experience going?
Unfortunately we I haven't been able YET to upgrade to LV2011 on any customer project, but I look forward to doing it because the switch from 8.6 to 2010 was really painfull in terms of build time.
Sorry to hijack the idea :$
We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.
TiTou: I would be interested to know why you make such a strong negative statement on the localized versions of LabVIEW. Generally, our international customers are very happy to have these localized versions which represent a significant and growing proportion of the LabVIEW sales. But if you have specific feedback for improvement, I am always interested to hear about it and see how we can improve our localized products. Also, localizing LabVIEW is never done at the expense of performance and stability. In fact, you would be interested to know that our Localization Team actively contributes to the quality of the overall product by filing CARs on problems very early on. So the more we localize, the more testing the products gets on various localized OSes and the better the quality.
Mathieur_T: You ask a very valid question. LabVIEW 64-bit is targeted at LV users who manipulate very large data sets such as Vision users or users of applications with very high channel count and need to go beyond the memory limitation of a 32-bit application. If you are not in that case and want a localized product, your best option is to run the localized 32-bit versions of our software on a 64-bit version of Windows thanks to Windows-On-Windows (WOW). So we believe most customers are still covered by the localized 32-bit versions of LabVIEW. However, we are eager to understand what future needs are, and so if you could please indicate in detail why this is important to you in this post, I'll make sure to relay your information to our Upper Management.
Hehe Babel is a nice name for a Localization manager 🙂
What happened to the tower at the end of the story?
Indeed my initial comment was quite negative and the least I can say is that with the explanations I received my judgement has softened a lot. Has I said, in the end if localization brings more money for features, perf & stability, then I can only be happy about it.
As integrator, when customers (not many in my case) get a LabVIEW IDE they often make the mistake of getting a localized version and that only creates problems us, at best there is just a vocabulary issue when talking with the customer who can access the source code, at worst it messes up the code (developped on english IDE, modified in french/german IDE).
I'm lucky to have facilities with languages but having to know what "property node" and "shift registers" were translated in spanish, french and german is not something I need.
It's all right to say that I am a bit short sighted, not everyone can switch languages and most people feel more comfortable with a localized IDE, but for technical stuff I think it is delusional thinking, it is just a feeling of comfort.
Trading off accuracy for comfort = lazyness.
We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.
As i said, a lot of french customers are asking why 64-bit localized versions don't exist, but if I take a look at the rate of 64-bit/32-bits users, this one remains weak.
In addition, most of customers who asked for this aren't young users, and you know how much old french people are reticent whith the English language (it's not their fault because a very few of them learned english at school).
I agree with TiTou for technical reasons, because I think that a 64-bit user knows well computers hardware and evidently speaks English, and I also agree with Babel for marketting arguments, because I know some people (even some young ones !) who will buy another software just for language comfort !
In addition, most of customers who asked for this aren't young users, and you know how much old french people are reticent whith the English language (it's not their fault because a very few of them learned english at school).
I'm sure "they didn't learn english" but that doesn't mean they were not taught english.
Ah.. I have tons of things to say on that subject (not all relevant to the original topic I must admit), but there is one that I want to rant about loud here!
Last week I attended the LabVIEW OOP training in France (at Saphir to be precise) and I met some french developers who were very happy to tell me that the french section on NI Forum is the largest non-english section. That's just a fact, so there we go... Nothing really suprising here.
But what was interesting to notice is that there is no german nor dutch section... and that's not because LabVIEW missed the german and dutch markets!!
Freakin frogs!
We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.
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