Sell Fast, the software wing of the American Sales Success Institute has a super-friendly program menu system intended to enable the most techno-illiterate to use any MS-DOS application. The Matrix Menu displays all command choices on a single screen and a single key activates each command or step. The Matrix Menu uses labelled boxes and connecting lines to show all steps for an entire program. Each box represents one step or command and the label on each box has a highlighted letter, which jumps the user to that step. Matrix Menu was designed by Newport Beach, California-based Sell Fast for its Sell Fast program designed to guide sales staff through selling techniques to increase sales; it sits on top of any contact management application. The company deliberately avoided a Windows version, branding Windows a toy and saying it was too slow an application for pressurised telesales employees to make good use of. Matrix Menu, says Sell Fast, enables sales staff with no computer training, to sit in front of a screen and achieve high sales and it could be used with any other MS-DOS program, providing a way for software developers to avoid the need to write a manual and a way for users to learn more than just a few basic commands, so making full use of their software. Also launched at PC Expo was Sell Fast’s CodeWare, a method of software protection, for which it is seeking a patent. It protects software against illegal copying by requiring a new access code to be entered periodically; the code is obtained by paying for the software; if it is not then the program locks, so that while it can be accessed, it cannot be amended. It was designed by a former US Army cryptologist, and it does not matter how many times a program is copied, Codeware will always be copied along with it and if the user does not register and pay for the application, Codeware will shut it down after a specified period of time. So far, Codeware is only attached to Sell Fast the program, and the company is actively encouraging people to copy the software, characterising it as a free trial. Sell Fast hopes to pick up customers in this way, finding people that like the program and will register as users. And it hopes to license Codeware to other software developers.
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