Microsoft has tried all kinds of things, in all kinds of markets, to maximize their income. One of the more nefarious:
Windows ANSI code pages closely match—but are not identical to—ISO-8859 character sets. Microsoft intentionally modified them to fill “blank” control character slots with symbols like curly quotes and currency signs.
When you look at the way windows handles i18n, it’s fair to say it caters to the US market.
Microsoft has tried all kinds of things, in all kinds of markets, to maximize their income. One of the more nefarious:
Windows ANSI code pages closely match—but are not identical to—ISO-8859 character sets. Microsoft intentionally modified them to fill “blank” control character slots with symbols like curly quotes and currency signs.