Last month when we sat down with PASS Engineering co-founder Florian Sachse for a coffee in Prague (coffee in Prague?), he beat us to the punch with a question: "How many habañeros would PASS buying Alchemy or Alchemy buying PASS get?" We thought that we were on to the latest merger in the language tools industry, this one uniting 2 small suppliers that offer the leading visual localization engineering tools. But Sachse's question was merely rhetorical, a response to our December 15th entry about the merger of Welocalize and Connect Global and his comment on the quickly changing supplier landscape.
With SDL and Trados no longer counter-punching with their translation memory releases, we can now look forward to semi-annual matches of mutual assured one-upsmanship between smaller ISVs. So following Alchemy's release of its Layout Manager in November, PASS counters with its own Layout Engine. In November Schaudin announced its latest offering in the localization engineering space. Not much has been happening at WizTom (as of today, the most recent company news items were from 2004). And we don't expect to hear from Finland-based Multilizer, which reorganized earlier this year and has disappeared from the radar screens.
But we digress. In our conversation, Sachse said that PASS would introduce software to improve layout productivity, but noted that Vista, Microsoft's next release of Windows, would finesse many of these interlingual layout problems. But from our long experience with software, we know that vendors will tell you that the next release of any product will fix every problem and that 6 months from now, everything will be better -- and that the paradigm-changing version is always just 12-18 months away. But we all know that perfection never gets any closer than a year away. Vista will be no different, especially with the indigestion that crops us with each new release of Windows. Despite Sachse's view that it won't be necessary once Vista ships, PASS will introduce its own layout engine because Alchemy's recent release has made it a requirement in the engineering wars. With those 2 firms now battling it out in a feature-function equivalent of the arms race, success will come down to execution -- and channels. We'll check back with 2 of PASS's LSP channel partners, Sinometrics and Skrivanek, on their experience selling PASSOLO. Finally, we have to thank PASS for putting its money where its beliefs are. PASS gives GALA members a 5% discount on PASSOLO licenses, then donates an additional 5% of the license fee to GALA. Last year PASS donated $6,900. This money is critical to funding the language market development and awareness activities of GALA, so bravo to the PASS team in Bonn for giving back to the market some of what it earns.
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