The fact that Canada is included doesn't mean the US companies respect Canada. They just look at Canada as if it's part of the US - ignoring the fact that we don't use "US English" and use metric. The only time they ever modify their products for the Canadian market are when there are specific laws forcing them to. Apple is just as evil. They invented something they call "North American English" (which is US English) and you can't buy an Apple Computer or product in Canada with proper English. They won't even let you buy UK versions.
I've got quite a lot to say on the subject. One of the things that drive me nuts is that Windows copies sold, for instance, in the UK default to UK regional settings when you install them. Those sold in Canada default to US regional settings. Both versions use the US English (even those sold in the UK).
I know it's not the end of the world, but the fact that they can't even set the default regional setting properly is really annoying. Ok, I know it's no big deal to change it manually but the fact is that lots of big companies use automatic installation scripts, ghosts, pre-installed copies, or just don't pay any attention during installation and just click "Next" all the time. What this leads in the end is that roughly at least 80% of PCs configured in various workplaces nowadays are set up with the wrong regional settings. No big deal you might think, what's the worst that can happen? A couple of dates printed wrong, a couple of incorrect measurement units...? Unfortunately, businesses that provide services to outside clients lose millions of dollars every year because of this stupidity. I worked in more than one company that offered services to other clients, and the same problem would inevitably crop up few times a year in every workplace.
When you finish processing the product on a computer, which might be of any type you like, data, documents, images, software... It will inevitably end up with something being wrong. For instance, one of the projects I worked on for months for the Government of Canada got rejected because the data on the final product was printed with a wrong date format! In Canada for instance, the official date format is either "Jan 2, 2007" or "02/01/2007". When we sent the product to the client, which in this case was the Government, the dates printed were all wrong, bearing stuff like "01/2/2007"!! At this point we had to redo months of work just to correct this mistake and obviously we could not charge the client twice, because it was OUR mistake in the first place. But it's the same with legal firms or pretty much anything else where the strict adherence to official standards or laws is required.
All these companies should actually sue Microsoft for the money they lost because of them, maybe then they'll implement a proper default regional setting to Windows copies sold in Canada.
This is but a tip of the iceberg, as lots more could be said about this whole business. It becomes even funnier when you get American locale settings mixed up with documents printed in French... let's not even go into the subject of keyboards. I mean I could go on for hours...
EDIT: Oh, and btw Amazon.ca lists "Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic English Upgrade [DVD]" at CDN$ 129.99.
