Shortcomings of the two traditional globalization dimensions

In traditional applications, language and country/region and their intersection as locale do not cover the following issues for software that operates in a global environment:

• Linguistic searching and sorting
• Phone number formats
• Address formats

Furthermore, traditional applications enable users to select only predefined locales. For example, users typically cannot select French as the language, and, at the same time, select formats for dates, times, numbers, and monetary amounts used by convention in Great Britain.