In the past, because of different locale language requirements, applications have used diverse encodings to represent this data internally. Since one of the goals of Globalization is writing code that functions equally well in any of the supported locales, we must come up with a data encoding schema that allows for the unique representation of each character in all the required locales for our products. Unicode meets this requirement.
Unicode text is usually easier to process than text in other encodings.
It also eliminates the need to keep track of which characters are which, plus the need to keep track of which encoding schema they came from. Just because a product is enabled to use Unicode, it is still not fully World-Ready. Figure 1 below shows the distribution of international characters and ideographs. Figure 2 shows an example of encoding Latin, Kanji and Kana characters in both DBSC and Unicode encodings. Beside making it possible to provide support for multiple scripts, any localized well-behaved Win32 Unicode based application can run on any language version of Windows 2000.