the marketplace for TMS products are dominated by a few commercial vendors most of them doesn't make big money with those products.
why?
the translation / localization domain requires strong domain knowledge which isn't widespread especially the combination of IT knowledge and linguistic, translation and localization knowledge is hard to achieve.
in addition translation / localization today still means to process input files from pretty heterogeneous and in many cases proprietary file formats (e.g. HTML, Word, Framemaker, Quark, Excel, XML, software resources, .....), translate them and create output files using localized content and layout. that is one of the most appalling jobs you can think of as a developer.
in general XML can reduce the requirements for TMS but the majority of users are still not using XML based content creation and therefore are not able to use XML as data format for localization.
what does this mean for success of the solution GobalSight?
to be honest i do not expect huge developer community dive into further development or even contribution in this solution because of the reason mentioned above. only if additional companies (like those part of the mentioned Steering Committee) provide development resource to this project this can be more than "just another way to herald end of life of a not successful product"
different views?
