1.1 The Need for Global Software Development

In an integrated global economy, software applications must be compatible in numerous languages and cultures. Users want to run applications in their own language, using their own local conventions. Furthermore, international companies have international needs. For example, a large corporation with headquarters in Tokyo and branches in New York and Paris may require a mixture of English, Japanese, and French software environments supporting multiple languages on one site.

To sell software to multinational companies, developers must always be aware of local customs, conventions, and requirements during development, such as character sets, numeric, time, date, and monetary formats, and messages. Adapting software to localized writing systems is particularly challenging in Asian markets. 8-bit encoding is good enough for European phonetic alphabets, but Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ideographs require multibyte encoding.