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Should I ask the following question here, or on Stackoverflow, or somewhere else?

At work I come accross a lot of Japanese text files in SHIFT-JIS and other encodings.
It causes many mojibake problems for all computer users.
Why is not everybody switching from Japanese-specific encodings to UTF-8?

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Doesn't strike me as being related to Japanese (the language) at all. On Stackoverflow I'd vote to close it as subjective & argumentative, since there's often no real answer for "why isn't" questions. Maybe programmers.stackexchange.com is the best place to ask.

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    The answer, BTW, would be pretty much legacy. Shift-JIS was used before Unicode became available/popular and many companies are still stuck with it for one reason or another.
    – deceze
    Jun 8, 2011 at 6:32
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    Thanks! programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/82396
    – Nicolas Raoul
    Jun 8, 2011 at 6:44
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    Japanese software industry... slower than dirt at utilizing new software/standards.
    – Mark Hosang
    Jun 8, 2011 at 8:10
  • @Mark: I wouldn't say that the Japanese software industry is slow, but it sure is quite insular (well, both literally and figuratively :)). It seems like it mostly has problem to adapt to international standards. :(
    – Boaz Yaniv
    Jun 8, 2011 at 15:48
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    my comment was not limited to international standards, but includes processes and overall skill in general. Lacks of DMS, bug tracker, back-office system, and relying heavily on excel files and print-outs is no way to run an efficient company, but i digress from the original topic.
    – Mark Hosang
    Jun 8, 2011 at 23:37
  • That's not just Japanese companies unfortunately. :( But I understand. It's just that it seems to me that Japanese standards like the JIS character set, EPWING dictionaries and i-mode were quickly adopted. Ok, that's really off-topic now...
    – Boaz Yaniv
    Jun 9, 2011 at 19:39
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I don't like that particular question, but if someone was asking "How can I set Windows-XP-chan to use Shift-JS?" (I don't know if that's a valid question), I'd suggest asking at Super User.

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