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Tiny Israeli Firm Goes For the Gold in Software
_Polyglot Program Symbolizes Export Hopes_
({Washington Post} - Page D1, 13 June 1993)
By David Hoffman, Washington Post Foreign Service

                                        JERUSALEM

   Above the bakery and next door to the sculpture studio in an aging
industrial zone here can be heard the voices of the new world order.

   The voices are not only talking in Hebrew, English, and Russian, but
they are also talking {about} Slovenian, Arabic, Polish, French, German,
Dutch and other languages.  And they are talking in the arcane vocabulary
of C++, a computer language, about creating umlauts, fonts and accents.

   This is the cramped office of Kivun Computers, Ltd., where Robert S.
Rosenschein and a team of programmers are polishing a new computer word
processing program that can write in more than a dozen languages at once,
in the same document, using Microsoft Corp.'s Windows system.

   The program, to be called Accent and geared toward Europe, will give
the user the typefaces needed for each language, as well as a graphical
"map" of the keyboard, spell-checking, hyphenation, thesaurus, help,
documention and "menu" choices.

   A decade ago, Western technology was carefully guarded from export to
places such as Poland.  But today, Rosenschein hopes to sell his word
processor in Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics, Romania,
Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria and other states where nationalism has been
rekindled out of the ruins of the old Soviet empire.

   A decade ago, Windows didn't exist either; Microsoft was still in its
formative years, and the personal computer revolution was just getting
underway.

   Now, Microsoft is a global software giant, inexpensive personal
computers are becoming available around the world, and their huge
popularity is opening the door to younger, aggressive entrepreneurs such
as Rosenschein.

   A decade ago, when Rosenschein immigrated here after working as a
computer consultant in Washington.  Israel was suffering through a series
of economic crises and still fighting the Lebanon War.  Now, Israel's
economy has stabilized, threats to its existence have abated, and peace
talks are underway with the Arab states and Palestinians.

   The company hopes to expand from the tiny Israeli market of 5 million
people to Europe and eventually to the Arab world, if there is peace with
the Arab states and the Arab boycott of Israel is dismantled, said
Jonathan Medved, executive vice president of Kivun.

   Arabic uses the same right-to-left formation as Hebrew, and Rosenscheim
has developed a way to make his program write in either direction, with a
click of a mouse.  He also solved the more complex problem of making the
program write in both directions in the same document.

   "We understand bidirectional software the way no one else does," said
Medved.  "Until now, Israeli software has not been welcome in the Arab
world.  We are going to test that."

   Israel's economic future may come to depend on the fortunes of Kivun
and companies like it.

   Each year, Israel continues to import $5 billion to $6 billion more
than it exports, and it relies on $3 billion a year in U.S.  foreign aid
to help close the gap.  But Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and others have
been warned that Israel cannot count on the U.S. aid forever, and they are
looking for ways to make the country more economically self-sufficient.

   The best way to achieve that is through increased exports, economists
say.  But Israeli firms historically have had trouble marketing their
products abroad.  It's commonly said by business leaders here that
Israelis are great at developing solutions to problems, but, with limited
capital and a tiny home market, they are not very good at selling them.

   "Nowadays for software to succeed, it's not enough that you have a
decent product," said Jeffrey Starr, marketing director for Magic Software
Enterprises Ltd., one of Israel's largest and most successful software
firms.

   "What really makes or breaks it is marketing, which requires a massive
amount of resources for advertising, literature, and exhibitions," Starr
said.

   What Kivun is preparing to do - mass-market a consumer-oriented piece
of software in Europe - is practically unheard of in Israel, although
other Israelis have invented and sold programs, such as virus-checkers, to
U.S. partners.

   Also Kivun may face competition; there is at least one multilingual
Windows processor being developed by a California firm.  In addition, for
Macintosh computers, which use a different operating system than the
IBM-compatible computers that run Windows, there is a multilingual,
bidirectional word processor from Nisus Software of Solana Beach, Calif.

   Kivun is also exploiting the flood of brainpower into Israel, a country
with precious little in the way of natural resources or manufactured
products to export.

   According to a Bank of Israel study, programmers and engineers
accounted for the two largest groups of professionals among the immigrants
who have arrived in the last few years from the former Soviet Union.
Kivun's staff of 15 programmers includes a recent immigrant from Armenia.
Seven of the translations needed for Accent are being done inside the
office.

   In technology, too, Kivun seems to be an upstart, poised to prick the
attention of global giant Microsoft.

   Microsoft has created a huge market for computer programs that run with
Windows, which allows the user to make simple choices from the screen
rather than memorize complicated commands.  But most of the Windows
programs today are in English.  In the word processor market, Microsoft is
offering its leading product, Word for Windows, in packages that have been
"localized" with another language, such as French or German.  Other major
word processors are also being offered in localized languages.

   But the key achievement of Kivun was to invent a Windows word processor
that can be broadly multilingual, running in several languages at once,
even in the same document.  "It was simply making Windows think in a way
it had never thought in." Rosenschein said.

   At first, when Microsoft wanted to create a Hebrew version of Windows
in Israel, it turned to Rosenschein.  Kivun helped develop the Hebrew
version of Windows, which came out last year and has sold 11,000 copies
here.  The program includes "Hebrew Write," a small word processor with
right-to-left text.

   Next, Rosenschein built his own word processor for Windows, called
Dagesh, which in Hebrew means Emphasis.  It can write in Hebrew, English
and Russian.

   Although there had been a number of Hebrew word processors, there was
nothing like it for Windows, and Kivun suddenly dominated the small
Israeli market.  The program has sold 4,000 copies since its introduction
this year, Medved said.

   Microsoft is expected later this year to introduce a Hebrew version of
Word for Windows, which includes some powerful features that Dagesh lacks.
Erez said many Israeli firms are waiting to see what Microsoft offers, but
the longer they have to wait, the more Dagesh will be able to dominate the
market.

   Now, Rosenscheim and Medved are getting ready for an even more
ambitious move into Europe, with Accent, which is expanded from Dagesh.
The program, which will sell for about $400, is to be introduced in
September.  It will not include Hebrew, but will include full
"what-you-see-is-what-you-get" documents to be created simultaneously in
more than 20 languages, including English, Russian, French, German,
Spanish, Italian, Polish, Portugese, Hungarian and Dutch, the company
said.

   Beyond Europe, Rosenschein said the program could be adapted to other
languages as well; for example to write in Afrikaans, or Welsh.  Since
Kivun is relatively small, the company can make a profit from selling only
a few thousand copies of its software in a niche market, which giant
Microsoft probably would ignore.

   "But the stakes in Europe are much, much higher," said Medved.