6. Most Valuable Products

We derive the term ‘most valuable product’ from sports where the best-performing player in a specific time period (e.g., a season or the finals series) receives the award of most valuable player (MVP). Such an award honors outstanding achievements in the field. The award, however, is not necessarily related to the market value of the player—although receiving an MVP award often correlates positively with subsequent income. Instead, the focus lies on outstanding performances; that is, a most valuable player improves the game by advancing some of its most fundamental aspects. In other words, an MVP combines knowledgebits to leverage diversity. For instance, introducing novel moves, faster ball-handling, and throwing three-pointers not only from way beyond the three-point line but with an outstanding success rate, made Stephen Curry from the Golden State Warriors the most valuable basketball player in the world. Having said this, the two-time reigning MVP of 2015 and 2016 was not ranked in the Top-10 of highest-paid NBA players, and you will not find him in the Top-50 list of NBA player salaries in 2015–2016 either. Translated into the world of products, we define most valuable products (including services) according to how diverse they address or solve a specific issue. In fact, the most diverse products are not necessarily the most profitable ones, but the ones with the most far-reaching value.

Data used and compared from Ethnologue as well as ITU and UNESCO, 2015: The State of Broadband 2015. Available from: http://​www.​broadbandcommiss​ion.​org/​Documents/​reports/​bb-annualreport2015​.​pdf (retrieved 3. November 2015).

Of course, this is the same line of thought as in the Abrams-Strogatz model (Abrams & Strogatz, 2003), which we saw earlier.

A similar policy was pursued in radio when the BBC decided to abandon its policy of mixed linguistic output and to introduce Radio Wales alongside Radio Cymru in the late 1970s.

cf. Hourigan, 2004: 60.

Personal interview with first director of programs at S4C, Cardiff/UK, 26 January 2009.

See S4C Annual Report & Accounts 1981–1982: 20.

Personal interview with an independent director-producer for S4C and BBC, Cardiff/UK, 18 January 2009.

Personal interview with first director of programs at S4C, Cardiff/UK, 26 January 2009.

Note that this is a structural principle also employed in statistical machine translation.

Personal interview, Llanelli/UK, 23 January 2009.

Personal interview, Llanelli/UK, 23 January 2009.

Personal interview, Aberystwyth/UK, 24 January 2009.

Personal interview, Aberystwyth/UK, 24 January 2009.

Personal interview, Cardiff/UK, 26 January 2009.

For Twitter activities in the Welsh language, see http://​indigenoustweets​.​com/​cy/​ (a project run by Kevin Scannell). The Welsh Wicipedia is also well interlinked dozens of other languages—from English to Chinese to Indonesian. Drawing from our own network analysis, the 10 most linked-to languages from the Wicipedia include English, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, and Italian.

This strategy has been adopted by various international agents in the past in a similar way. One of the early examples is New Greek comedy (320 to about the mid-third century BC) which ‘universalised’ its playwrights by omitting then-popular Athenian characteristics of Greek drama (Slater, 1995). No longer was a specific audience directly addressed or rivals affronted, and no references were being made to required stage machinery. For example, the plays of Greek dramatist Menander—the most prominent figure of New Greek comedy—also lacked the specific political and social references of Old Greek Comedy and became popular within and in particular outside Athens, with adaptations (translated and also performed as musical comedies) for the Roman stage. South Italian vases (a favourable medium by then), for example, are testament to performances by Greek touring companies. Slater summarises that ‘the fourth century comic theatre…was so compelling…because a diverse and internationalised audience created an enormous demand for a standardized and portable product.’ (45) New Greek Comedy also is said to have been influential on other agents with international outreach such as Shakespeare.

Similarly, a standards engineer of web browser developer Opera Software that I interviewed on the internationalisation-localisation strategies argued in view of smaller languages: ‘It’s only that the markets are smaller. It’s simple market economics. If you get 0.1 per cent of a market in a small country, then you only get a small percentage of people. If you hit 0.001 per cent of the global market (targeting English or Chinese speakers), you probably make more money. For example, if I target Norway, I can only hit, say 3.5 million people. But if I target Germany, I have the potential to hit 90 million people.’