Skype Launches Service in Arabic, Arabic Domains Not Far Behind
The Arabic language has caught the tech bug. Within the last week, Egypt, Tunisia and others applied for Arabic IDN ccTLDs. Just yesterday, Skype announced that it is offering its website in an Arabic version to attract hundreds of millions of Arabic speakers as customers.
Skype’s decision to aggressively market to Arabic Internet users in their own language is a tip of the hat. Between the lines Skype is saying that it realizes the promise of non-Western countries with huge populations and enormous percentage Internet usage growth. In addition, the message is that to truly tap into an emerging Internet market, you have to speak the language.
Kudos to Skype. As many companies will follow Skype’s trail, it will soon be certain that you need to use foreign characters when competing in a foreign environment.
Great move, but the only problem is getting the Arabs to pay for their service. Credit card systems, the way we use them in the west, aren’t the same. It’d be interesting to how this works out for them, but I really don’t think they have much to lose.