To input alphabetic scripts such as Cyrillic, Arabic, Thai or Bengali, however, you would have to change to a different 8-bit character set. These different character sets were previously standardized only at vendor or national level. Switching between them leads predictably to problems when exchanging data over international networks, or even when using two sets at once in a bilingual document. Two unified international coding standards for all the world's written languages went into development in the early 1990's. This is accomplished by mapping characters in a logical order to one of 65,536 16-bit code points.
Unicode standardization is by no means a purely altruistic effort.
With membership including such major multinational software and technology developers as Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Xerox, Claris, Sun Microsystems and Disney's Go, the economic motivation for a unified character standard becomes apparent. Whether commercial motives are central to the standardization effort or merely a side benefit, international adoption of Unicode effectively makes international versions of multinational software more competitive, and better positioned to take over markets lead by local niche products designed for specific languages. A unified international coding standard is badly needed in a networked world, and both the Unicode Consortium and the ISO are continuing their work with linguists, scholars, programmers and national standardization bodies to complete the coding project as equitably and accurately as possible. Nonetheless, the effort has faced its share of criticism. A good deal of resistance has come from Japan and China, countries that potentially need more than their allotted space to uniquely describe all their thousands of characters.