"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win..." —Mahatma Gandhi
I'm not sure if they're ignoring me or laughing at me, but we're definitely making progress :) . Actually there's no reason we should fight because we're not even competing.

This comes for Michael Kaplan's blog. Michael Kaplan is the guy in charge of the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator and the tech lead for internationalization in Microsoft. Microsoft has released 64 bit versions of Windows XP/2003 in April 2003. We're now in December 2006, over three and a half years have passed, and there's _still_ no way to create keyboard layouts for these operating systems, although Michael blames Microsoft's management for this, and it will be released hopefully in the next few months. It doesn't seem Microsoft is taking keyboard layouts very seriously.

He doesn't criticize the layout, he criticizes ALL alternative keyboard layouts. Frankly, I don't expect Microsoft to include Colemak in their operating system before it gains more mainstream acceptance. Although I'm really hoping Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator will add an option to remap Caps Lock to Backspace.

Of course, Microsoft is a huge organization and while some people might not like the idea of Colemak, other people will. Jensen Harris, the guy in charge of designing the Microsoft Office User Interface and a user of the Dvorak keyboard layout, was very excited when he heard about Asetion (the predecessor to Colemak) "Oh man, this is the first I heard of Asetion. I want to try that out now!".

In the future I'm sure there'll be more and more people working in Microsoft who'll use the Colemak keyboard layout, and they'll perhaps be able to change things from the inside.

Wow, based on that one discussion on that one blog entry, Mr. Kaplan seems to be a bit of a jerk (although, it should be noted, not enough of a jerk to delete Shai's posts without warning.) How surprising that the guy in charge of MSKLC has no interest in improved layouts or the possibility of reassigning Caps Lock and other "special" keys. I mean yeah it's great to have support for lots of languages, but supporting languages that are not built into the OS must be a very small niche for Microsoft. Surely the /potential/ market for efficiency-focused layouts is much bigger than the market for layouts for obscure languages that MS doesn't support. Then again, Mike would know better.

BTW, Shai, you mentioned speaking five languages which is very cool. I don't want to downplay the importance of MSKLC for unusual languages since I speak Esperanto (and besides I often have use for math symbols), so I know how annoying it is when you can't type the characters you need.

But personally I don't see how either market makes any significant profit for MS, so I'm simultaneously very glad that MSKLC exists at all, and disappointed that the high-efficiency layout market gets the short end of the stick.

Shai said:
'If you receive "tons of mail" about alternative keyboard layouts, it shows that there's a lot of interest in that area. I'm a bit disappointed to see a "this isn't my department" and "a big customer isn't paying us to do this" mentality, instead of a "getting things done _right_" and a "thinking out of the box" mentality. If we're talking about perceptions of Microsoft, you're not setting a very good example.'

I completely agree.