The Google Apps Status Dashboard came online in late February as a way of offering “performance information” about Google’s various products. The information was only available in English, however, and Google’s now letting users all over the world become more well-informed with the introduction of 24 new languages.
Here’s a full list of the fresh languages: Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian, and Vietnamese. So quite a few people should be able to get the official story the next time Gmail seems to be down, for example.
As for why Google’s taken this step, the slowdowns and outages that have occurred as a result of Michael Jackson’s death likely aren’t the reason; the turnaround time is too fast. It’s more probable that the development comes in response to recent instances of censorship in China.
Or this may just have been a project that got stuck on the backburner and launched when it was good and done, regardless of outside circumstances.
Anyway, here’s one more detail concerning the new languages: according to a post on the Official Google Enterprise Blog, “There may be times when we’ll give you a link to additional details in English or a smaller subset of languages in the interest of communicating as quickly as we can, but you’ll always find an announcement about the current status of our Apps products in the language you select.”
