Standards create new opportunities for differentiation and innovation.

Windshield wiper blade refills are a fairly common part, so I stopped at Walmart and bought refills of the proper length for my van for a total of a little less than $4. On any other vehicle I have ever owned, this would have been sufficient, but when I went to install the refills, I found that they did not fit the Previa since it uses a special Toyota system to hold the refills in place. I next drove to an automotive parts store, only to find that not only did the store not carry a refill for the Previa, but they could not even order one!

No vehicle has ever been sold on account of its windshield wiper blade locking system.

I asked the worker what to do, and he told me to contact Toyota. So I got back in my car and drove off (with a windshield getting progressively more dirty) to the local Toyota dealership, arriving five minutes before it closed for the day. At the dealership, I was able to get the refill, at a cost three times higher than I paid for the generic refill at Walmart.

A generic wiper refill costs $4… a Toyota proprietary part costs three times as much.

Toyata’s decision to have a proprietary system for windshield wiper blades cost me quite a bit indeed when my time is factored in, and it would have been even worse if I had lived in a town without a Toyota dealership. Maybe I should just count myself lucky that it only took three hours of my time to obtain the refill. Of course, if the generic part could be used, it would have taken me only about twenty minutes to get the part, and I could have spent that time thinking about world peace or something like that, rather than having a three-hour fantasy of breaking every bone in the body of some poor engineer in Japan.

Toyota may have made an extra $8 today, but lost $5,000 in future profits to get it.

It would be one thing if there were a demonstrable need for the Toyota part to be different or if the difference created some real advantage, but I am afraid that no vehicle has ever been sold on account of its windshield wiper blade locking system. In fact, the differences between the Toyota part and the generic part are slight indeed, and the “genuine” Toyota blade is inferior to most of the third-party options available.

Staying proprietary conveys, at best, short-term advantages.

This example points out something that should be obvious about standards: standards are embraced where there is no real value to a company or indvidual for differentiation, or where differentiation creates problems. Where meaningful differentiation is possible and desirable, end users don’t mind it. Using a proprietary system for windshield wiper blades adds no conceivable value to a vehicle. On the other hand, no one would complain that their Jaguar sports car can’t use engine parts from a Toyota van, because the difference in engine between the two vehicles creates a real value difference. Standardization allows companies and individuals to specialize in what they do well rather than having to do everything, most of it poorly.

At the same time, standards create new opportunities for differentiation and innovation: with third-party blades, I could have gotten double- or even quadruple-bladed wipers for rain and snow; I could have gotten special polymer-coated blades that help keep dirt from adhering to the windshield in the first place; I could have gotten long-life silicone wipers. Standardization in how the blades hook to the vehicle allows tremendous variation in blades since the makers can reasonably assume that their product will work with any vehicle (except the Previa!). Deviation from the standard on my vehicle assured that I was stuck with a single option for an inferior part.

Staying proprietary conveys, at best, short-term advantages. Sure, Toyota made a healthy margin on the two strips of rubber I had to buy, but the effect is that next time I am looking at buying a vehicle, Toyatas will be much further down my list of possibilities than they were. My experience makes me wonder when else I’ll need to buy a “genuine Toyota part,” only to find that it costs me $1,200 instead of $375, and that I’ll have to wait three weeks for it to be delivered. Toyota may have made an extra $8 (the difference between the cost of Toyota part and the generic part) today, but they may have lost $5,000 in future profits to get it since I am now significantly less likely to buy a new Toyota than I was a week ago.

In the GILT industry, we are in the same boat. We can keep to our Balkanized worlds of vendor formats, or we can open up. If we don’t embrace open standards, sooner or later we will all be in the position of losing the $5,000 profit because of the $12 part. If we stay focused on wringing the last ounce of gold from our customers, we won’t even know what hit us when they run away. The solution for us is to embrace standards and work at differentiating our products based on our strengths, not on mechanisms that lock our customers in, based on differences that often give about as much advantage as my “genuine Toyota part” gives me.

Now I only hope the IRS (the Internal Revenue Service in the U.S.) will let me write off my new wipers and my mileage as business expenses since I wrote about them here!

One last note: there is still time to sign up for some of the LISA Workshops in California. Plus, if you sign up for Customizing the LISA QA Model on February 27, you will receive a copy of the LISA QA Model 3.0 (a USD 450 value) at no additional charge.

In this issue…

• We start this issue off with a look at recent developments in the world of speech recognition technology in Dr. Amy Neustein’s Sequence Package Analysis: A New Global Standard for Processing Natural Language Input? (premium content). In this article, Dr. Neustein outlines her pioneering work in speech recognition and how it relates to call center and government security applications, as well as to international needs. Until recently, most speech developers seemed to assume a monolingual world, so the speech technology industry is now in a position similar to where software was prior to the development of internationalization frameworks and such important infrastructure as Unicode. Dr. Neustein’s work in Sequence Package Analysis (SPA) outlines revolutionary ways in which speech technology can better meet international needs.
• In the world of content standards, XML is king, but many companies and clients have found making effective use of XML difficult. Many have turned against XML entirely, or have questioned its use. According to Dan Dube of Innodata Isogen in Making XML Work for You (premium content), many of the problems faced by companies can be solved by better planning and understanding of XML. He also holds that, contrary to popular belief, XML workflows can be cost-effective at low volumes of document production, and that when localization is added to the mix, the cost-saving potentials of XML are even more impressive.
• In my review of FontLab’s Asia FontStudio 4 (premium content) I run this Asian font editor through its paces. While Asia FontStudio may have more features than the average user will need, it is an amazing tool that allows users to work with large fonts in an environment optimized for Asian font work.
• Recently, the best-selling author Umberto Eco turned his insightful gaze to translation and the role of negotiation in translation. LISA’s review of Eco’s Mouse or Rat? Transation as Negotiation looks at the convergence between literary translation and GILT in many regards. It then shows how Eco’s concepts can help improve localization quality through a better understanding of the ways in which any translation or localization necessarily negotiates a position amidst competing demands.
• In The Buzz: Our Readers Talk Back, we look at the issue of the size of the U.S. Hispanic market, which several readers questioned us about. By the way, the Globalization Insider was vindicated!
• And finally, in a pair of Letters to the Editor, Rory Cowan of Lionbridge looks at the issue of quality and quantity in localization, and Kim Harris of text&form responds to a previous article by Mr. Cowan in So, Just Whose Pocket Is It, Anyway?, by arguing that recent industry consolidation and the rise of “The Big Three” have not been entirely positive for the industry. She outlines why the economic conditions that have sustained the growth of the largest suppliers in the GILT industry cannot be sustained in the long run.

And a bonus for our readers this month…

You may have noticed the “Rank This Article!” buttons at the end of each article. We looked at these rankings for 2003 and, using some arcane number crunching to combine them with information on page hits, came up with a list of articles that our readers said were good and that they came back to again and again. Here are the top ten, in alphabetical order by author’s name:

• John Chandioux:
  Translation Technology for Sale: Buyer Beware
• Victor Gaultney (an interview by Arle Lommel):
  Gentium: Providing Type to the World
• Tony Gray:
  Making Sim Ship Work
• Andrew Joscelyne:
  Europe as the Model for Globalization
• Arle Lommel:
  Unicode - Where Are We?
• Jesús Maroto:
  Return on Investment in Multilingual Websites from a Marketing Perspective
• Anthony Pym:
  What Localization Models Can Learn From Translation Theory
• Translator X:
  Towards A More Equitable Pricing Structure: A Translator’s Perspective
• Translator X (an interview by Pierre Cadieux):
  Interview With The Translator
• Kara Warburton:
  Terminology: An Introspection