Through the amazing magic of mobile computing and wireless networking, I'm finishing up some work while my daughter watches a (commercial free, courtesy of Treehouse TV here in Canada) episode of "Timothy Goes To School" beside me.
Today's episode features the "Japanese" character and her mother (both portrayed as cats, of course) doing a show-and-tell demonstration of a Japanese Tea Ceremony. While I wouldn't normally post an entry about an episode of a pre-schooler's television show, this provides a convenient segue to my interest in Japanese culture (from a philosophical and social-structure perspective - I don't own a single anime and I've never watched Robotech). The tea ceremony is one of the elements of Japanese culture that seems so...philosophically wise: Taking a moment to actually pay attention to, and appreciate, the most minute of details seems so enlightened, and is so contrary to most of Western culture.
To continue this long and drawn out transition to a post about the software business - About a year ago I decided to learn Japanese (with an eventual goal of an extended visit to Japan). When you have no immersion this can be extremely difficult, and in the limited time I've been able to allocate towards this fringe goal, I've learned the glyphs and pronunciation of the Hiragana and Katakana alphabets. Given that real world Japanese intermixes a massive set of Kanji in with that, not to mention that there's crazy things like words and grammar used to communicate, it really means that I have no functional Japanese ability beyond transcribing Japanese sounds. Nonetheless, it's been very enjoyable, and has indirectly taught me a tremendous amount about human language - it's akin to learning a new programming language, and circuitously gaining insight about the languages that you already know.
So what does any of this have to do with anything? One night some time back I was weighing how much time I really wanted to dedicate towards this fringe goal, and what, if any, software tools existed to help the process. My search brought me to Declan Software's ReadWrite series. Judging from my own experience, which I think would be similar to others, Declan is an excellent case study for small software publishers to learn from.
Not only did they allow me to demo their software to an extent that made me feel confident in a purchase - but still leaving me hungry for more - they also allowed me to satisfy my impulse with immediate satisfaction (I immediately got a full-unlock - no waiting for snail-mail. Obviously this sort of impulse buy would only happen for relatively inexpensive software, but if it wasn't as immediate I would have likely put off the purchase, during which I probably would've lost interest, or found a different product). Any worries I might have had about handing over credit card information to a small vendor dissolved when I saw that their payment processing was handled by regnow (who I'd worked with before).
To really put the icing on the cake, they also offer a small discount for buying a set of related products together (Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana).
All fears were eliminated, they satisfied my impulse, and they maximize the revenue by selling me additional products I didn't originally intend to buy. All from a random search engine hit.
(For those considering or studying Japanese, I highly recommend the superb JWPce as a great little accessory tool. With the dictionary, including English to Japanese, it is remarkably useful)