History

It’s hard to launch a product into a market place where that kind of product already exists. Then it’s particularly satisfying when your product soon becomes the market leader. That’s exactly what happened back in the early nineties when Microtext launched a teletext decoder for the PC. A major part of the launch was the press release and a significant role was played by this photograph...

Taken well before the days of computer based photo editing the picture was produced by 1) taking a picture of the teletext card against a black background, 2) Taking another picture of the teletext card with a Polaroid back on the camera, then, 3) Cutting out the poloroid print, spraying it matt black and suspending it via cotton threads between the camera and the computer screen. The press released was published in the news sections of all of the major computer magazines at the time including some which still exist today such as Personal Computer World and Computer Shopper. Microtext featured in the news sections alongside names like Novell, IBM, Lotus and Microsoft.

Why did the product become the market leader ?  Because it was the best, simple.  The other products that were available had flaws in their design. One example... Optimum Technology started selling our product branded under their own name, they had previously done this with a competitors product and we had a call from them some months later... "Don't take this as a complaint, but we haven't had any back yet !" Apparently the product they had been selling was returned regularly and Optimum used to send the returns back to the manufacturer who would "fix" them and send them back. Such was the scale of the problems that Optimum used to mark the returns before sending them out again and if they had the same one back more than once they would refuse to accept it back from the manufacturer.

Then came Microtext for Windows.... more on this soon !