A real question is why IBM, Apple, and Microsoft poured millions into developing the unicode standard instead of treating character encoding like file formats a

A real question is why IBM, Apple, and Microsoft poured millions into developing the unicode standard instead of treating character encoding like file formats as a venue for competition. IBM and Apple in the early 1990's combined in Taligent to try to beat MS NT, but failed. But a lot of internationalization came out of that and was made open, at the perfect time for Java to adopt it. Interestingly it wasn't just CJK but Thai language variants that drove much of the flexibility in early unicode, largely because some early developers took a fancy to it. When you look at the actual variety in written languages, Unicode grapheme/code-point/byte seems rather elegant. We're in the early days of term vectors, small floats, and differentiable numerics (not to mention big integers). Are lessons from the history of unicode relevant?