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Chapter 12. Linguistic resources and localisation 201Table 2. Nine vectors of scalability and growth associated with the Three Phases of localisationindustry developmentNo. Vector Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 31 Geography and languages Europe Asia Global2 Standards Trial &Error Proprietary Open3 Content Manuals/UI General technical Any content4 Rationale Return onInvestmentRights-basedInvestment5 Medium of delivery Documents / BoxedproductsCD-ROMOnline / Pureinternet-based6 Culture Symbols Rights Values7 Delta 6-9 months “SimShip” (within True SimShipquarter)8 Cost per language High Medium Low9 Release cycles (months) 9–18 3–6 Continuousoriginal version, is tremendous: deltas, the time between the release of the originaland a localised version of the same digital content, are moving towards zero.The number of languages in which digital content is being made available was initiallyrestricted to just French, Italian, German and Spanish, the so-called FIGSlanguages, but has since grown dramatically.On 29 January 2007, Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer, Steve Ballmer, announcedat the Windows Vista and the Microsoft 2007 Office System WorldwideAvailability Celebration at The Windows Vista Theatre, Times Square, New York,N.Y., that Microsoft VISTA will be available in over 70 countries, starting out in 19languages and becoming available in over 99 languages by the end of this calendaryear. He said, “Afterward you can go think whether you can name 99 individuallanguages, but that’s sort of the extent and the cover and the reach that we’ll havewith the Windows Vista product” (Ballmer 2007).Of course, it would never be possible to tackle this extraordinarily high numberof language versions using the same processes and paying the same pricecompanies were prepared to pay in the old FIGS-only days. The cost per wordprocessed in a localisation environment had to be dramatically reduced. One wayof achieving this cost reduction is described in a report by Forrester Consulting forSDL in 2007, entitled “The Total Economic Impact of SDL Global InformationManagement” (Forrester 2007). Based on this report, SDL estimates the cost of“missed opportunity” due to poor localisation by global business at $4.7 bn andrecommends a highly automated and well managed Global Information Management(GIM) approach to localisation (SDL 2008).Yet, there is a believe by industry experts that even today only 90% of whatcould be localised, can be localised given the still relatively high cost and high