For a Western company, that may be: use a first name and a last name field which works for 95% of our customers and inconveniences the other 5%. But that 5% is already used to it.

Which of course goes against the spirit of the original article.

Yeah. I think I would personally go for two fields -- first name and last name -- with a hint that 'if unsure, use lastname' so that the rather common(?) 'sort by lastname' would make at least some sense in most cases, and the requirement that at least one of the names must be non-empty.