You're feeding the diversionary sock puppet and propagating its stupid Subject. We don't need to increase the world's supply of stupidity. We need to find a way to convert anonymous stupidity into useful work. That would be the big victory against entropy!
On the story I think the point should be the reverse-imperialism. The Chinese government could have gone with ODF, but they deliberately preferred to insist on doing it their way--and they apparently have even gone the extra kilometer to annoy the rest of the world. I wouldn't be too surprised if they decided to drop the metric system, too, replacing it in the Middle Kingdom with some new system based on traditional Chinese units...
Funny anecdote about the triumph of Microsoft in Japan. Perhaps related to a major defeat in China, too, since I've heard that vertical Chinese writing has mostly been abandoned in China... Pre-computer context in Japan is that the traditional writing system for Japanese was from top to bottom and then continuing to the next column on the left, so the columns go from right to left on the page. In the Meiji period they started experimenting with some horizontal writing, but they did it from right to left. Later on they switched horizontal writing so it goes from left to right. But all of this is kind of weird because when they write individual characters, the primary direction is mostly from left to right with top to bottom kind of mixed in... However the basic idea makes most sense as a bunch of boxes to fill in with characters, and there are standard pages for writing drafts (by hand) that are laid out that way.
When computers came along, the Japanese developed a word processor called Ichitaro that "thought about" the document in the same way. I used several versions of Ichitaro during those years. It was closely linked to an input conversion system called ATOK for entering the Chinese characters (using the monstrous Shift-JIS encodings). After several years of struggle against Microsoft, the Word approach won out, sort of, though there are still places where vertical writing is used in Japan... (Most of my Japanese reading is vertical, and I still think that makes the horizontal Japanese tests kind of unfair or unrealistic.)
(So can anyone explain why there are two Nihongo Noryoku Shiken with different English names?)
[Now has anyone written a good joke about the story?]
