Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Visio
Visio was an interesting niche company that developed a sophisticated graphics
package that used predefined shapes and links. Visio supported various software
diagramming methods such as flowcharts and UML diagrams. It also supported
other forms of scientific and technical graphics.
This company was formed in Seattle, Washington, in September 1990. The
founders included Jeremy Jaech, Dave Walker, and Ted Johnson. All of the
founders had worked together at Aldus Corporation.
As so often happens with software startups, there were several name changes.
Visio started with the name Axon Corporation. In 1992, it changed its name to
Shapeware. In 1994, it changed its name to Visio 1, and when it did an IPO, the
name was Visio.
I was a Visio client in the late 1990s before Visio was acquired by Microsoft in
2000. The current name of the company is Microsoft Visio. The acquisition was in
the form of a stock swap and amounted to about $1.5 billion. This was Microsoft's
largest acquisition at the time.
The graphics technology of the Visio products uses vector graphics and a pro-
prietary file format, so Visio diagrams cannot be read or opened by many other
software applications. However, Visio can open other graphics formats. (The Libre
Office suite can open Visio files and in fact may be an industry leader in opening
more file formats than other office suites.)
Although Visio is cited in this topic primarily because it supports software en-
gineering diagrams, it is in fact a very eclectic tool that can produce diagrams for
many scientific and engineering fields, including electrical engineering, chemistry,
and even botany.
The shapes and diagrams are organized as stencils and templates, and it is fairly
easy to scroll through Visio catalogs. In addition, third-party vendors offer custom
stencils and templates for Visio. For example, the networking company Cisco has
a library of Visio stencils for various kinds of networks and products such as op-
tical networks, routers, security flow, and many more.
Visio is a good example of a “niche” software company that provides a special
kind of tool for special purposes, but graphics design is a pretty large niche with
millions of potential engineering and scientific customers. Visio is not alone and
has many competitors, such as SmartDraw and even the open-source Libre Office.
However, Visio has a large market share in a variety of scientific disciplines. With
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