Why would you care about UNICODE? Come on now, most people can read english and english can be written using only 7-bit ASCII, so who needs more? Well, I think it's safe to say that Internet (remember that? Netscape, WWW, .com booms, pet food on the net etc) changed all that. Now applications can be found and run everywhere by anyone, more or less, so even if the application speaks english, and even if the user does, you may end up with users inputing data using some other character sets.

For someone like myself, having grown up in a "beyond A-Z" part of the world (Sweden, which is one of the easy cases), I can tell you how annoying it is when I input my address on some webpage (this happens even on swedish website)s using some swedish characters (I got 2 of the 3 beyond A-Z characters in the name of the street where I live), and it comes out looking like someone just smashed a fly prominently placed in the name of my street.
…