Josey Puliyenthuruthel: Going the vernacular way

GIZMO GALLERY

The Indian PC market is beginning to ripen. More than three million desktops and laptops were sold in the country in 2003, expanding the installed base by almost a third warming the hearts of international PC vendors and their local peers HCL Infosystems, Wipro and Zenith. And, of course, local assemblers.

As the market matches its growth this year on the back of higher consumer spending, e-governance projects and corporates seeking to expand their reach in India, analysts predict new additions to the PC-owner fraternity will come more from the second- and third-tier cities and towns.

According to estimates, there are between 500,000 and 750,000 installations of legal local language software on PCs. And growth predictions are 60 to 70 per cent in the years ahead.

This throws up interesting situations. For one, English "" used by under 5 per cent of the population "" ceases to be the lingua franca in software.

So, there's this sudden flurry in the market with local language solutions, two of which we'll review today: the Microsoft Office Hindi suite and Shakti Office, a competing productivity package from a small, Chennai-based company. There are more local language offerings but I haven't been able to review them as yet.

Microsoft launched its Office software in 11 Indian languages early this year. It can handle Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Bangla, Malayalam, Punjabi, Konkani, Sanskrit and Marathi.

You can type in any of these languages using, say, Microsoft Word, but the user interface are in English and Hindi only, for now.

The company's Program Manager (localisation) Raveesh Gupta says that user interface will be provided in all 11 languages soon. Also, Microsoft is working on including Oriya, Assamese and Sindhi language into the suite.

In addition, it is working with more than 10 Indian developers to provide new applications with its Office suite. Add-on extras like a Hindi text-to-speech converter and special dictionaries have already been developed.

Punjab National Bank and the federal government's department of income tax have been impressed enough to pick up bulk licences of the product.

The software works well with all the features of the usual Microsoft Office, including text inserts, dictionary, formatting options, tables and so on.

The unicode character set used in the software boosts language adoption in a big way. I've seen only the Hindi version, but reckon the other local language versions will be as useful.

In a sense, the local language Office suite allows Microsoft to demonstrate the effectiveness of its productivity software and thereby quickly get more and more people converted to its other software packages such as databases.

With Shakti Office, my experience was mixed. The software loaded easily and quickly, but there are some bugs the software maker needs to work on.

For instance, there are small differences in short-cut keys while editing that are irksome if you come from a background of using Microsoft Office or Star Office. Admittedly, that shouldn't be a worry for a first-time computer user in, say, Tamil.

Further, I faced a problem when saving a document as a .doc file on "SOwrite", the suite's word-processor. Whenever I hit ctrl-S, the shortcut command for saving, it would throw up a new "Save" window asking me the directory I wanted it saved in, with the option to rename the file.

Besides such mild peeves, I like Shakti Office. It comes in two options: English-Tamil or English-Hindi with development of an English-Telugu version in the works.

The English-Hindi version I used comes with an easy toggle button that allows customers to easily move between the two languages with the press of a button (F3) or by changing the language of the interface by clicking on a menu icon.

Of the two, Microsoft's local language Office comes across richer in terms of features and the multitude of dialects it supports. But the difference is pricing.

Microsoft labels the product with prices upwards of Rs 20,000 each licence, but has flexible bulk pricing rates for volume buyers. Depending on which category you fall in, you could buy a version for anything between Rs 100 and Rs 10,000, according to market sources.

Shakti Office, on the other hand, retails its offering at under Rs 2,000 with chunky discounts for big buyers.

Josey Puliyenthuruthel can be reached at

josey@vsnl.net