Those Wacky Foreigners
From Fark, I found this article describing how Microsoft is sending its employees to geography classes:
Insensitive computer programmers with little knowledge of geography have cost the giant Microsoft company hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business and led hapless company employees to be arrested by offended governments.
Seems that these furriners have a lot of chips on their shoulders, frequently over examples of furriners wanting to be even more furrin:
Perhaps the best known, and one of the most expensive, errors was a colour-coded world map showing time zones, which showed the disputed Jammu-Kashmir region as not being in India – an offence under Indian law.
…
[E]mployees were arrested in Turkey because Kurdistan had been shown as a separate entity on maps of the country
…
Microsoft employees were questioned by police in China, where it is an offence to refer to Taiwan as country or as the Republic of China.
The peace-loving followers of Islam are also quite sensitive:
One mistake that caused catastrophic offence was a game called Kakuto Chojin, a hand to hand fighting game. The fighting went on with rhythmic chanting in the background which in reviewing the game Mr Edwards noticed appeared to be Arabic.
“I checked with an Arabic speaker in the company who was also a Muslim about what the chant meant and it was from the Koran. He went ballistic. It was an incredible insult to Islam.”
Huh? Using a quote from the Koran in a game is an insult to Islam?
A game called Age of Empires 2 offended the Saudi Arabian authorities because it showed victorious Muslim armies turning churches into mosques.
Yeah, because we all know THAT would NEVER happen.
Of course, no “old media” piece would be complete without the obligatory head-scratching “say what?” quote:
The mistake led to the whole of the Windows 95 operating system being banned in the country, losing large sales. For its replacement, Microsoft Office 97, Microsoft removed the colour coding…
Office 97 was a replacement for Windows 95? What the…?
August 19th, 2004 at 10:33 pm
I read snippets from a book a while back on what not to do in other countries while on business. Some countries shaking hands is a no-no and stuff like that.
August 19th, 2004 at 11:40 pm
I completely understand the need to follow local customs like that, but I think it’s kind of kooky to lock somebody up for having certain territories colored separately on a map.