New Launch: Latin Insights @ Intel
posted by Jason Swihart on June 06, 2007
Intel's second international blog—Latin Insights@Intel—launched Tuesday without much fanfare, but after the successful Blogs@Intel China launch, I was quietly excited to see how this one would go.
Of course, I knew it would be a smooth launch—MovableType Enterprise along with the framework Jay developed for Intel makes these launches straightforward and bombproof. But in a former life, we spent tremendous energy developing “Enterprise Class” CMSes to, among other things, provide an “easy” path to internationalization. These behemoths were (and are) complex, difficult to use, unreliable, and expensive, and each launch of a localized site was arduous and often painful.
By contrast, with MTE and our own secret sauce, we can launch a Chinese or Spanish language blog in about a man-week and that's exciting. We hand it off to the local bloggers, move to the next project, and know that it will operate reliably and that the bloggers will be able to use it. That's because MovableType is built around a simple core task: publishing written content. People can understand what that task entails and it's a problem that can be solved in a way that they'll understand.
As it turns out, that sophomore-computer-scientist's pie-in-the-sky dream of an all-encompassing Site Management System is fool's gold. The only customers that can pay for such systems are those with huge budgets—but they can manage content with man power. The only clients who want such a system are those who can't afford it—but they need to focus on realistic goals. So, having a client like Intel might sound like a software developer's dream. They have more money than God and can afford any system we can dream up—the fabled all-in-one social-media super-system. Yet, we dream up something modest—why?
The answer is: because individuals—not software—create compelling information. If you want interesting information for your markets in Latin America, do you hire a team of translators to convert your English marketing and P.R. into Spanish and then enter it all into a multi-level software system where it can languish until someone remembers to maintain it? Or do you roll out a simple tool that your Latin American employees can use today to talk directly to their respective markets?
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