| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Tech |
| How eight pixels cost Microsoft millions |
| 2004-08-23 |
| The software giant has seen its products banned in some of the biggest markets on earth--and it's all because of eight wrongly colored pixels, a dodgy choice of music and a bad English-to-Spanish dictionary. Speaking at the International Geographical Union congress in Glasgow on Wednesday, Microsoft's top man in its geopolitical strategy team, Tom Edwards, revealed how one of the biggest companies in the world managed to offend one of the biggest countries in the world with a software slip-up. When coloring in 800,000 pixels on a map of India, Microsoft colored eight of them a different shade of green to represent the disputed Kashmiri territory. The difference in greens meant Kashmir was shown as non-Indian, and the product was promptly banned in India. Microsoft was left to recall all 200,000 copies of the offending Windows 95 operating system software to try and heal the diplomatic wounds. "It cost millions," Edwards said... I got a good laugh. |
| Posted by:Ptah |
| #6 "female" or "bitch" How can you tell the difference? That's easy, Raj. Females enjoy sex. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2004-08-23 3:47:02 PM |
| #5 "female" or "bitch" How can you tell the difference? |
| Posted by: Raj 2004-08-23 1:04:22 PM |
| #4 Given the Spanish cojones deficit issue, a more accurate selection would be "not specified" "female" or "bitch". That seems to cover all the bases. |
| Posted by: Grunter 2004-08-23 12:02:55 PM |
| #3 While the India-Kashmir debacle represents "eggshell ego" levels of diplomatic hauteur, the Spanish SNAFU is far more egregious: Microsoft has also managed to upset women and entire countries. A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between "not specified," "male" or "bitch," because of an |
| Posted by: Zenster 2004-08-23 11:03:04 AM |
| #2 "Some of our employees, however bright they may be, have only a hazy idea about the rest of the world," he said" Or, many of your employees, brought up in a comfortably liberal democratic republic, where taking offense at cultural slights is considered uncool, puritan, or worse and therefore such slights are to be shrugged off at all costs, are simply unprepared for the level of rancor other cultures are willing to rise to over perceived slights. |
| Posted by: Carl in N.H 2004-08-23 10:24:06 AM |
| #1 I was interning at MSFT the summer that Win95 was released and remember talking with the graphic artist/programmer who had made that map. A user used to be able to select what time zone he was in by clicking on the map and having it highlighted. The Indian government didn't like that Kashmir wasn't highlighted when you clicked on (western) India! He and the programmers had spent many hours on it and had used what he called a "UN-approved" world map as their guide, and they were very shocked and disappointed to hear of India's resulting boycott. The map is still there (double-click on the time display in your taskbar and select the "Time Zone" tab), but instead of clicking on your region to highlight the time zone you now must select it from a dropdown. And I doubt that will change any time in the near future. |
| Posted by: Dar 2004-08-23 10:15:28 AM |