In today's world it is very important to establish brand awareness. As Hans Fenstermacher explains in his article in #46 Volume 13 Issue 2, our industry would be greatly helped if we had a snappy slogan that was widely promoted. I agree with the general thrust of his article, but I do have some concerns about the terminology that would be used in such a campaign.
In this industry we should all be aware of the importance of clear terminology. The first thing we need to decide when promoting our industry is what do we call it. Hans uses the term GIL as an acronym for "Globalization, Internationalization and Localization," but his suggested slogan of "Got Global?" would clearly emphasize the globalization part of the long title.
In IBM we are trying to standardize on the terminology that we use. We say that the term internationalizationrefers to basic enabling tasks (e.g. character handing for various languages); the term localizationrefers to the task of translation plus the task of adding complete locale support (e.g. date formatting); and the term globalization refers to the work involved in getting the product to support multiple languages and locales simultaneously (e.g. a single Domino server might support English, German and Japanese users and all of them would consider that the server was supporting their language and locale). Even within IBM, there is considerable debate about this terminology, some people consider locale support to be part of internationalization rather than localization.
From this point of view globalization is an extension of localization, which in turn builds on top of internationalization. Customers who have operations in a single country are generally satisfied with localization. However, mutilnational corporations typically want globalization. With localized server software, companies are forced to have a server for each country. With globalized server software, it becomes possible for multinational companies to establish a single powerful server that serves users in all of their country offices that can result in significant savings in administration costs.
Outside of IBM there are many other definitions of globalization. When I search on Google for the word globalization, the vast majority of the matches I get are under the broad area of "economic globalization". There is no wide agreement between these sites about what exactly they mean by globalization, but they all seem to agree that localization and globalization are exact opposites. There also seems to be a majority consensus among these web sites that globalization is a bad thing that should be resisted.
The widely accepted definition of economic globalization implies a process that liberalizes and standardizes the rules concerning international trade. If you are in favor of globalization you would say that it is about freeing companies from petty bureaucratic interference and arbitrary local laws. If you are against economic globalization you would say that it encourages unfettered global capitalism and that it enables large multinational companies to circumvent national government policies by moving their activities to wherever in the world offers the most liberal regime.
There is a weak connection between software globalization and economic globalization, because globalized server software enables multinational companies to consolidate their data centers in a single location. I am sure that the readers of this magazine have a variety of views on economic globalization in common with the diversity of opinion among people all over the world. Therefore, we should be careful of calling this industry 'the globalization industry' if we do not wish to alienate many people for whom this has negative connotations.
For this industry to thrive, we should agree on a common terminology
for the various activities we are involved in. If we agree that
software globalization is the eventual aim of the services we offer,
then we need to clearly differentiate software globalization from
economic globalization. If we don't establish a clear identity for our
industry, the consequences might be worse than simple public
indifference; you might have a crowd of anti-globalization activists
demonstrating outside your offices. If you have watched news coverage of
recent G9 conferences, you will realize that this is not a pleasant
prospect.