Personal computer utilities specialist Symantec combined the opening of its Hong Kong office with a product release last week that featured new integrated toolsets and communications suites emanating from its Norton and Delrina product families.
Symantec, which only recently joined the anti-piracy Business Software Alliance, was ripped off by tens of thousands of Hong Kong computer software buyers last year following the release of Windows 95. Its award-winning Norton Utilities suite, packed with fix-its for awkward configuration problems for the 32-bit operating system from Microsoft, was critically acclaimed by dozens of reviewers and industry watchers as 'an absolute must' for PC users seeking to install the new OS.
Illegal software merchants in the territory, bowing to public demand, obliged by bundling Norton Utilities for Win95 with pirate versions of Win95 sold in Hong Kong's software piracy hotspots last year.
Garry Sexton, regional managing director for Symantec's Asia-Pacific operation, said the new Hong Kong office was part of an increasing effort of localisation of its software products.
A team in Tokyo has the specific aim of producing localised versions of all Symantec products to achieve simultaneous beta code in English, German and Japanese.
The presence of double-byte Japanese code early in the software development schedule gives Symantec a relatively easy conversion process to other double-byte languages such as Chinese and Korean. Double-byte characters are used to represent the complex character-based languages in text formats that require more binary information than the Roman-based alphabets.
