Unpredictable Obstacles: When Your Localization Efforts Can Be Destroyed Instantly
by
on May 25, 2009,
As a Russian living in Russia and doing business internationally, I am known for my strong belief in localization for internet products - both for startups and established web companies. Yet sometimes one realizes that even the best efforts can result in absolutely nothing because you can never predict everything about a country where you operate your newly-localized product.
I have already complained a few times about Facebook never bothering with the Russian market until last year only to find out when they finally launched a Russian-language version that the social networking market is already taken by existing local players. The irony is that right now the leading Russian social network is a full clone of Facebook while Facebook itself is on the 7th position well behind the established market leaders.
Of course I can never avoid thinking about how unwise it was for Facebook not to notice the market and only come up with a localized version when it was too late to be able to really change the situation. But it now turns out that in some cases even the best efforts with localization to enter the local market turn out to be worthless because of one thing that tends to invade all aspects of our lives: politics.
Today’s news from Iran is yet another proof of how politics can change the playing ground for companies thousands of miles away: on Saturday, prior to presidential elections the government of the current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad banned international web resources, including Facebook and Twitter, to prevent the opposition from talking to their electorate there.
While traditional media, including television, is heavily controlled by the government in Iran, web resources have been a viable alternative for those politicians who wanted to voice out their alternative opinions and be heard by their voters. For example, Facebook (that is notably available to Iranians in Farsi) was one of such good tools that allowed one candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, to gather more than 5 thousand supporters.
It is no wonder that Facebook representatives expressed their concerns over this decision as it means lost opportunities for them in the country during this high period when people are looking for objective and uncensored information where it can be obtained - and the obvious loss of investments they have made to localize and launch the version of Facebook targeted at people speaking Farsi (Farsi is the spoken language of Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan so it is not a total loss, especially since it is most certainly temporary only).
The presidential elections will take place in Iran on the 12th of June and I would not expect the international web resources to be unbanned until then - no matter how deeply concerned their owners are over this situation. And since Ministry of Telecommunications of Iran is told to operate a system that lets them block various web sites from being accessed by Iranian population in accordance with the judiciary, I think this may not be the last such event during this presidential campaign - and certainly not the last one for the current government if no changes arrive after the elections.
