Interview of Lori Brownell

General Manager, Windows International and Global Services Division

Lori Brownell graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle,Washington with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science. She’s been with Microsoft for 16 years, spending her entire career there in the Operating Systems Division. The last 11 of those years she’s been working in the field of internationalization and multilingual computing. Lori is currently the General Manager for the Windows International and Global Services Division as well as a member of the Board of Directors for the Unicode Consortium. How long you have been into Localization, and the Microsoft & Unicode platforms and what are the changes you have seen in terms of technical challenges, consumer acceptance and usability issues? How did you/your developments evolve over the years? L: I’ve worked in the International area of Windows for 12 of my 16 years at Microsoft. All 12 of those years of International work have been related to the implementation of Unicode and the furthering of its benefits within Microsoft products. The challenges early on were related to moving from a fundamentally 8 bit encoding system to a 16 bit encoding system and getting past all of the inherent assumptions that were made regarding the length of a character. There were also many challenges relating to text rendering and sorting. Past encodings were created with many limitations. However, they were optimized for ease of basic rendering and sorting. Unicode was designed to allow for universal data exchange. To provide linguistically correct rendering and sorting additional work was done and appropriate APIs needed to be called to provide the correct results, e.g., sorting could no longer be assumed to be a simple less than or greater than comparison of the code point value, rather APIs needed to be provided to return the correct results. While this may seem to complicate the coding of applications, it also greatly improves the correctness and multilingual abilities of the applications.

Which is the largest non-English language used for computing? Why? When did it start?

L: The majority of software and web content is still English, however Unicode and well globalized software is greatly expanding the opportunity for any language to be used in computing and on the web. The number of languages that are prevalent on the web, as well as the number of applications and websites in languages other than English continue to increase rapidly. As the availability of the Internet and technology reach more and more people the language of technology will continue to shift towards those languages that are spoken/read by the greatest numbers of people.

How were the non-Unicode days? What were the advantages and disadvantages?

L: Prior to the introduction of Unicode in Windows interoperability across language versions was extremely difficult or non-existent. Many will argue that the coding was much simpler, however, many things were simply impossible or extremely difficult, like exchanging data across language boundaries or handling data that spanned multiple languages within applications. The rise of the global economy and the internet has made these types of features of critical importance in the technological world of today.

Where does Unicode stand with respect to Indic Computing? In terms of technical challenges, developer community acceptance and usability issues?

L: Unicode is an International Standard (ISO 10646) that is widely adopted around the world. There are certainly those who doubt it’s correctness and completeness, but is a good and accurate collection of characters needed for multilingual computing. As omissions are found they are evaluated and resolved, however, the stability of the encoding standard is one important aspect that is critical to the acceptance and widespread use of any standard. We are seeing the acceptance of Unicode in India go through many of the same stages that it has gone through in the rest of the world, only in India the technical community seems to be seeing and understanding the benefits much faster once accurate and detailed information is provided. The largest challenge that exists for Unicode in India is that of educating the large IT community on the technical details and benefits of the standard, as well as the new methods of coding for 16 bit code point values and handling characters that are composed of many code points instead of a one to one relationship between code point and glyph. While this may seem confusing and challenging it really isn’t due to the broad API level support that exists in Windows and the increased functionality and powerful text handling that is made possible in the Unicode world.

What is the future of Unicode in terms of Indic computing?

L: The Unicode Consortium continues to work with local technology experts across India and the rest of the world to continue to improve and build on the solid Unicode foundation with the ultimate goal of being able to represent all written languages in use in the world today. This means that the standard continues to add new scripts as well as continually take feedback from experts on the existing scripts to make sure that they are complete and up to date, while preserving the required stability of previously defined code points that is necessary for implementers to be able to effectively use a standard. The Indic scripts have been defined in Unicode for many years now and while the Unicode Consortium believes that they are fairly well covered, the Unicode Technical Committee has on-going discussions with many of the Indian language experts across the country to ensure that Unicode contains all of the necessary code points to represent and render all of the Indic scripts in a culturally correct way.

What technology areas do you think MS should focus/improve?

L: Microsoft must provide an ecosystem that allows our partners to build commercially viable solutions on our platform. One aspect of doing this is to make it simpler for developers to create Unicode applications by improving on the tools and supporting information that IT professionals need to take the fullest advantage of Unicode on the Windows platform.

Where do you see Indic Computing opportunities 10 years from now?

L: As a much larger number of Indian consumers gain access to computers the necessity to have Indian language applications and platforms is exploding. Along with that the importance of being able to handle multiple languages easily within documents, databases, and web based content is growing exponentially. If you combine that with the fact that Indian developers are continuing to grow in their production of software for many companies and industries all over the world, spreading the Unicode message is gaining in importance. The global economy and the ease of world wide communications and data exchange via the Internet is creating a new market for developers both inside and outside India to tap into new customer markets world wide and reach millions of new users who would have otherwise been left out of the computer world, but supporting many new languages is the key, as most of these new users will not have a good understanding, if any at all, of English. In 10 years time, I would expect the percentage of web content in various languages to be a much closer match to the actual percentage of language speakers around the world. Unicode is a fundamental enabler of such a multilingual and inter-connected world.