Microsoft's multiple cultural blunders

[Doctor Q]

Link: Microsoft's race relations blunders revealed

Microsoft's lack of political savvy has cost the Redmond behemoth millions and seen its products banned in some of the biggest markets on earth.

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When colouring a map of India, Microsoft coloured 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.

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Chanting of the Koran used as a soundtrack for a computer game and caused great offence to the Saudi Arabia government.

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It managed to further offend the Saudis by creating another game where Muslim warriors turned churches into mosques.

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A Spanish language version of Windows XP gave users an option to select their gender from not specified, male or "bitch", due to an unfortunate error in translation.

Has Apple somehow managed to avoid blunders like these?

 

[edesignuk]

Just read about this in the Metro this morning, made me laugh!

 

[Nermal]

Apple's cultural blunder: When you select New Zealand in International Preferences, it defaults to M/D/Y dating instead of D/M/Y. And then there's one that MS is also guilty of - the 'thousands separator' defaults to a comma instead of a space. Windows has had this incorrect setting for so long that the majority of people in NZ seem to think that a comma is correct!

Edit: Reported to Apple.

 

[munkle]

Apple's cultural blunder: When you select New Zealand in International Preferences, it defaults to M/D/Y dating instead of D/M/Y. And then there's one that MS is also guilty of - the 'thousands separator' defaults to a comma instead of a space. Windows has had this incorrect setting for so long that the majority of people in NZ seem to think that a comma is correct!

Edit: Reported to Apple.

Admittedly annoying but not quite up there with Microsoft's efforts!

 

[BornAgainMac]

"A Spanish language version of Windows XP gave users an option to select their gender from not specified, male or "bitch", due to an unfortunate error in translation."

This was the funniest one to an American viewpoint. The other ones didn't seem nearly as bad. I wonder if crusader would be like saying "bitch" in the middle east. They probably hate Batman.

 

[jhu]

"A Spanish language version of Windows XP gave users an option to select their gender from not specified, male or "bitch", due to an unfortunate error in translation."

This was the funniest one to an American viewpoint. The other ones didn't seem nearly as bad. I wonder if crusader would be like saying "bitch" in the middle east. They probably hate Batman.

you can laugh about that all you want, but in what other country besides nicaragua does 'hembra' mean bitch? i bet practically no one in spain knows that 'hembra' means bitch in nicaragua.

the other ones aren't that bad either. especially the one concerning taiwan, which is really an issue with freedom of speech.

 

[whooleytoo]

Has Apple somehow managed to avoid blunders like these?

Apple's pretty good at catching these things.

In Copland, the startup "Smiley Mac" winked during boot up, but a bug report was logged against it stating winking might cause offence in some cultures, so it was removed. It's an indication of how thorough Apple QA can be (or, at least, used to be).