Facebook has Director of Monetization. It’s funny that company like Facebook really has to have somebody responsible for making money. Being valuation of 30 something billion, some people might think it is CEO’s job and the whole purpose of the company. Well it doesn’t always work like that, especially when you want to create something good. You have to have huge vision and you need to devote all your time and energy while working towards it. The bigger the goal is, the more strongly we want to achieve it.
Get Localization’s goal has and have been to revolutionize whole software localization industry. Our background is in developing software and we do that really well. We are not localization professionals and in fact when people have asked why we started to develop something like this, the answer has been “Because we hate localization”. We came to this business because we asked ourselves “Why this needs to be so difficult?”.
Well I think we are half-way there. We have had success cases, for example our own products have been translated to over 20 languages among many other cases. Just following our own way of doing things, we’ve managed to build software localization community that is totally unique and stands on its own. But to really revolutionize this industry, there needs to be new business models. Why?
“While demand for language services has continued to grow (at a rate of over 13% per year), for the most part the price of translation and localization services has dropped.” – Common Sense Advisory, August 2010
That sounds healthy to you? Come on, is it really so that couple of nerds needs to come and tell you that this doesn’t make sense? Localization industry needs their own Director of Monetization. But uttermost localization industry needs to wake up and start thinking how to improve their product. It is not ideal if us, developers, your customers need to enter this business in order to make things happen.
To make money, you need to have that HUGE vision. How long you can make business just by screwing translators? Are you thinking out of the box? Are you really asking what your customers need? Are you really thinking where and how you can make that money? Do you understand that everything will change?
If not, you are going to die.
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