New products are rarely released worldwide. This is especially true in the mobile world. Phones appear in one region of the globe, then the rest of us get to wait a few months (if not years) to see it. The iPhone, for example, was the hottest phone of 2007, but only in the US. It’s still not available anywhere else.

Those delays can be understood, since companies have to prioritize based on stock and manpower. Market studies can also make them think that it’s not worth their bottom line to sell an item in a country if the demand might not be there. I do have to wonder why some companies go even father, however, and actively prevent products from being bought or shipped overseas. Product restrictions, DRM, or lack of support shouldn’t be the standard, it should be seen as a poor business practice.

There is no reason, for example, that a company would refuse to service an item that it sold simply because the item was purchased in another country. If a cellphone is bought in Hong Kong, and brought to Canada, then the company will often request that the owner contact the office in Hong Kong. Worse, this still happens when the phone is finally being sold locally.

What really pushes the boundary of understanding behavior, and the point of this article, is when this starts to happen with software. The main one which annoys me right now is the Microsoft Windows Live Messenger. You may recall in May 2007, when an official MSN client was found on the MSN China site. At first it worked globally, but soon they restricted it to China and Taiwan only.

Almost a full year later, this restriction is still in place. While we have dozens of third party applications available on various phones that can connect to the Windows Live system, they still restrict their official player. Is it to force people to use Windows Mobile devices to have an official client? Who knows.

Now today I found out they have yet another client. This time it seems they followed in Yahoo!’s footsteps and made a full featured client for Live Mail, Messenger, Search, and so on. But what do we see? It’s only available to European countries. Sigh. Who would have thought Microsoft was a US company.

I’m sure there’s a reason, presented to management, behind closed doors, which must have made alot of sense at the time. But the reality is people will just use third party clients, or find some hack to use it. And what this means is we get partial support of the features, or people go to other services such as Yahoo! or Google. I would think the goal of free services such as Instant Messaging and web mail would be to get as many people to use them as possible. But apparently the hardware model is just as used in the software domain. And it’s a damn shame.