About a month ago I noticed that a guy named Marty Korn had down-loaded ActiveWords. We are always trying to figure out what we are doing right and what we are missing as we try to build and expand our user base.
I googled Marty and found that he was a well known and sophisticated psychiatrist. So… I reached out to him, found him to be a terrific guy and I asked him a couple of questions, e.g. :
“How do you get people to modify their behavior so as to try an application like ActiveWords?”
“What are we missing in terms of our product, pitch, ideas, vision, etc.?”
I figured that given Marty’s background and skill set, he would be a natural to answer my question. Marty has turned out to be a great guy, and has posted an essay about ActiveWords here.
What ActiveWords and for that matter every little software company needs is about 100k guys like Marty.
Another great review--no surprise there.
Marty is right when he says: "The main reason for this probably lies in the computer users and software developer’s commitment to the graphical user interface (GUI). Ease of use of graphically based programs is clear. However, keyboard shortcut commands are often more rapid but greatly under-utilized by the computing public."
I mentioned something similar when I got ActiveWords a couple of years agto. I've been typing for decades and my brain is wired that way so it made sense to me to type commands--even if my commands are longer than most would consider using. When you type 95 wpm typing even 10 characters to initiate a command isn't really an issue and the command isn't cryptic and hard to remember.
Maybe the issue will resolve itself as texters migrate to ActiveWords use.
Posted by: Kay Brooks | June 24, 2008 at 09:17 AM