The problem with Unicode

The author, in his 'Seven Great Blunders of the Computing World' column (Computer, July 2002, p.112, 110-111) claimed that Unicode was a blunder. The author reconsiders this and states that he stands by his claim, but states that this does not mean that he considers it to be a failure. He does however claim that a different approach would have worked much better for encoding text, documents, and writing systems.