If Maxwell Hoffmann were to be given a tagline, it would be, “I’ve seen the future, and we’ve already been there.” The trends are iterative - amplified, but definitely repetitive. Don’t misunderstand him - Maxwell thinks it’s an exciting time to be alive. In fact, he is excited about life in general. He’s a man with a vision, and listening to him connect the dots is akin to releasing the ball in a pinball machine and watching it ricochet back and forth, speeding between topics.

When DocTrain caught up with Maxwell at Welocalize, he talked about how far technology had come since the 1980s, when he stumbled into enterprise and desktop publishing from digital typesetting. After all, in the 1980s, Unicode hadn’t even been invented. Who ever thought they would be doing business with Russia or China, let alone have team members in India? Who would have anticipated the complexities of delivering multilingual content for global consumption, in multiple channels, in multiple media?  Many years with ISO-9001 certified, translation vendors have given Maxwell a front line perspective on successful localization and communication in our global economy.

Now, Maxwell feels that technology isn’t changing fast enough to keep up with ever accelerating globalization. Part of that, he feels, is product drag due to slow adoption by a reluctant market, a market managed by a generation slowing down when it comes to accepting inevitable “set-up” costs. Maxwell recognizes that he may not be the norm for his generation, and has had to “reinvent” himself to bring new perspectives to the executive suite.

When pressed for an example, Maxwell points to uncovering instances of Product Abuse. Much as substance abuse happens when one or two glasses of wine at dinner turn to eight or nine, Product Abuse happens when the amount of information being processed exceeds the limits of a product’s design. For instance, office productivity word processing gets pushed to unreasonable limits for, say, long technical documents and online help. Instead of dealing with the core problem and adopting the appropriate technology, product abusers hang onto their comfort product for dear life and abuse the heck out of it. They refuse to give up that product until a project crash-and-burn—an intervention of sorts—finally makes them see that there is a better way.

Unfortunately, such misguided product abuse can lead to a significant amount of unnecessary billables in localization projects. Having split his professional career evenly between working for software vendors and being an actual customer in production, Maxwell feels unbiased in recommending the right tool or process to match a customer’s needs in the multilingual arena. And the choices are many.

If you’re interested in global product delivery, make sure to attend Maxwell’s presentation Beyond L10N and G11N—Communicating with Everybody: How To Create and Manage Content Assets for a Global Audience at Documentation and Training West.