“Surprise, surprise

After more than 10 years of using Microsoft Products, I must say that these guys in Redmond (still) don’t grok internationalisation as a whole. In every new software release, you will find strange things because of internationalisation – be it that Programs don’t work because of different file and folder-names or other stuff. One particular thing that always bothered me that they internationalised the wrong stuff. E.g., Outlook in German always added an “AW:” in front of a subject when you replied to a mail. This might be nice if all people used a german Outlook. But E-Mail programs usually look for “RE:” because this is the “official” way of doing it. Consequently, you either removed these “AW:” by hand or your mails would chain up like “AW: RE: AW: RE: AW: …” if you had an intense E-Mail exchange. Anyway, we now use the glorious Office 2007 Suite at work and recently, I discovered a small but nice improvement they made regarding this problem. If you receive an E-Mail with an “AW:” in the subject and you reply to this mail, Outlook 2007 (EN) will silently and correctly replace that “AW:” with a “RE:”. Thank you, Microsoft. This saves me a few minutes every day.