Steve -
STAAD (and CSI) both have some very strong ties to India and Pakistan. Many of their early founders / developers were immigrants from those countries (as I understand it). As such, they both reached out to that market in the early days. Hence, they had features and codes for that region before other programs.
Now, it is likely pretty difficult for other companies to break into that market. There is just an inertial resistance to change.... Meaning, a company may not be 100% happy with their software, but they look at the cost to switch and decide that it's not worth the effort (in time and money).
As far as Australia goes, I suspect that STAAD's treatment of the Australian market might be like RISA's.... it's codes are in English, so they get implemented pretty quickly. However, they may not have any developers or engineers that are truly native to the region. This is important because in order to truly meet the needs of a region you need frequent communication with the engineers who work there, the types of projects they work on the types of analysis that is frequently done, the little peculiarities of what is emphasized by plan checkers or engineering societies or universities or such. Heck, having a sales engineer that feels shame when people come up to him at a engineering conference complaining about a bug will put a lot more pressure on the company to do better testing on that portion of the design code.
My disclaimer (because now I'm giving opinions, not just laughing
![[bigsmile] [bigsmile] [bigsmile]](/data/assets/smilies/bigsmile.gif)
): I used to work for RISA, now I work for CSI. Hence, I have some bias in the matter and my opinions should be viewed considering that bias.