Microsoft has revealed plans to abandon the "local-market feature" approach to languages in the upcoming Windows 8, instead allowing anyone to install any and all supported languages.
The situation with installing display languages in Windows has always been fairly restrictive, often needing a special version such as Windows 7 Ultimate, just to be able to display some other language.
In a new blog post on the Building Windows 8 blog, Microsoft said that Windows 8 would dump the confusing downloads of languages from Windows Update and the Microsoft Download Center and instead languages will be more easily installed in the control panel.
Microsoft's international team manager Ian Hamilton highlighted the usage case of a PC in a fairly common US scenario where Spanish would be useful for parents while English would be for their children.
Windows 8 will also be the first version of Windows to support "English for the United Kingdom", ending 27 years of a refusal to acknowledge English spelling preferences in the long line of Microsoft operating systems.
"We admit that this is something we should have done a long time ago," wrote Hamilton. "Windows users in the UK have gotten by with the US English version of Windows, and while we Americans knew this was not their favourite, that is clearly no defence," he joked.
Hamilton noted that this English dialect would probably be used by a number of other countries including India, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and Ireland. Well colour us surprised.
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