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Visio to be bought by Microsoft
terrified wrote to to us with the official word that Visio has been purchased by Microsoft. Visio makes some incredible network diagramming and technical drawing software and is used extensively worldwide. The deal was a 1.3$US billion dollar stock swap between the two companies.
Doesn't seem to likely. Unofficial Red Hat CD's can be given away or sold extemely cheap, even downloaded. Microsoft wouldn't be too happy with that. I would expect Microsoft to develop their own *NIX system instead, not based off open source.
Microsoft buying Autodesk? Geez, I'm going to have nightmares tonight.
Buying a company that makes software isn't exactly like buying a company that produces oil, metal, etc. There's no hard limit to the amount of software that can be made. Which is why I think this antitrust bit is completely out of touch with reality and pointless. How can MS have a monopoly in the software/os business when there are thousands of operating systems you can buy and when you can write your own software? I despise MS products and so I don't use them. I couldn't do this if MS had a monopoly over what I can install on my computer[s]. Most people use the way MS demands oems to install MS or nothing as an example of their supposed monopoly, but these companies signed those contracts willingly. They want the most money possible and most of the people buying computers want Windows. These are the same people who bought pet rocks and tamogotchis. No one needs to force them to buy useless shit, they'll do it themselves.
If Microsoft wasn't allowed to buy Intuit, why
would they be allowed to buy Visio?
I used to see those visio developers on the Bainbridge Island (In Seattle) Ferry run all the time - they were your windows-type drone developers. It's not a great suprise to see Microsoft "innovate" Visio into their fold.
Having discontinued their unix ports, they now find themselves boxed into a platform on which they may have to compete with MS bundled products. It's nice to see another MS-friendly business plan work out that way.
yes, you can do your network :)
with the latest cvs version (see www.gnome.org) you can define your on objects in a xml-style. it also supports printing and exporting to ps.
really a nice peace of software
have fun
mike
Forget Visio, get TGIF
The interface sucks a little, but it is programmable and web-friendly! Maybe this program doesn't get the attention it deserves because of the name. (it has nothing to do with gifs)
http://bourbon.cs.umd.edu:8001/tgif/
Rational? M$ unloaded its Visual Test Software to them. Frankly they really screwed that product up. The first version they released still had Micro$oft labels in it, the version I use, 6.0 hasn't been changed that much from version 4.0 except its "web" related.
Talk about holding an industry back, over priced, negative usability, bloated, slow, cruddy, crappy, but everybody uses it piece of garbage. That will be one funeral no one will attend.
Looks like I'll be looking elsewhere for mechanical drawing packages now. I absolutely refuse to knowingly contribute to Billy-boy's coffers (which, by now, have got to be at least as bloated as his company's software). I agree that doing something like this in the face of an anti-trust trial, with a verdict yet to be rendered, is even dumber than would normally be expected. Then again, it may not be stupidity... just a flash of the sheer arrogance that Micro$heiss is (in)famous for. Up yours, Billy-boy. I hope DoJ gives you the spanking you so richly deserve (and obviously never got).
Your history of IntelliCAD is correct as far as it goes, but you've failed to consider the implications of Visio's recent moves toward open sourcing IntelliCAD. IntelliCAD is not yet Open Source, and it will be interesting to see what happens to the fledgling IntelliCAD Technology Consortium now that Microsoft has bought Visio. Equally interesting is the possibility that Visio sought to shed IntelliCAD precisely to make themselves more attractive to Microsoft (I've got to believe that the Microsoft/Visio deal was already on the table when the IntelliCAD source announcement was made.) Perhaps Microsoft is not interested in a vertical niche like the CAD marketplace. I can't say that I would blame them -- it's a demanding development market with a limited number of customers from whom to recover costs, much less make a significant profit (or had you missed the recent large layoff announcement out of Autodesk?). Diagramming software, on the other hand, is a much more horizontal application, as are Microsoft's existing Office applications. Only time will tell how this one plays out for Autodesk and the other CAD vendors.
Who has a tallent for killing
PC Magazine editor's choice products suchs as ECCO....
I was at SGI's Linux University conference in DC last week. During the talk Corel was giving about thier Linux distro, the guy said that they will begin working on CorelDraw for Linux once everything is done with thier distro and WP stuff.
Have you guys PRICED Visio Technical lately?
Have you priced MS-Office lately?
I had a copy at one time and liked it. Called Corel ????? connect or something....
A, AutoCAD's competition is not Visio. B, AutoCAD is ~$3K per seat C, One of AutoCAD's big competitors is MicroStation who I believe is or has done a Linux port (but is also thousands per seat) D, Star Office has a drawing component but is more akin to Corel than Visio E, VariCAD is cross platform and has features similar to AutoCAD. F, There are several open/free projects out there but most are still in early development
I guess I'm just filled with apathy... I mean ..why even bother... MS has enough money.. power ..etc.. to pretty much buy - steal - coerce (sp) whatever they want.. one at a time..they will buy all that is good in the software world... Bend over and grab the lubricant...
I was wary when MS bought SourceSafe, a fine source code control package. Well, Microsoft Visual SourceSafe actually has *fewer* features (if you don't count Visual Studio integration, which could have been done without touching SourceSafe), and *more* bugs. Yea!
Fortunately, this will only spur development of free alternatives.
Too bad they didn't GPL it instead
plan on keeping it that way!
It never ceases to amaze me. There is a group of you out there who whines
every time Monoposoft sticks it to you and the computer industry yet again,
but you steadfastly refuse to abandon the game.
You must like it, because you keep asking for it. So like I said: bend over.
Again.
I want to work for a company that I believe in, but now I've got to consider looking for a new job when I've got a house payment/car payment/baby on the way/whatever.
I was hoping that we might release Visio for Linux, PalmOS, etc, but now I don't think there's a chance in hell.
Oh well, it looks like I'll be moving from a downtown Seattle office to a Redmond office.
This purchase is sad for a number of reasons but mostly because it is another blow to real competition in the software market. We all should know by now that Microsoft simply doesn't tolerate competition.
It was only a matter of time before Microsoft went after one of the most capable products in a market niche in which they have no viable products. Still, Microsoft purchased Visio.
Why??? Because Visio demonstrated the real shortcomings in Microsoft's other products. Have you ever tried to create something as simple as a flowchart or organization diagram in Powerpoint? Nuff said.
I only hope that the trade regulators manage to shut this off the way they did when Microsoft went after Intuit.
But the basic use of Visio remains drawing cute little professional-looking boxes for flowcharts that only PHB's seem able to understand, much less follow.
Living in a fit of teen angst and rage. Get a life. I'd be embarrassed to put a HREF in to my page if I were you.
MS snots? Are we a little bitter?
have you SEEN all the graphics products they make already?!?!
Everybody knows that the whole reason behind M$ doing this is to shore up another application and make sure that it doesnt get ported to Linux. So if you want to do something like this, you have to use Windoze. But if you can do it with some other app that is free, doesnt that pretty much cancel out what M$ is doing?
M$ is a big company with its own security people, I've often wondered if people that do things that threaten its bottom line are targeted for bodily injury and/or other forms of "removal?"
If I was Linus Torvalds or anybody in charge of a piece of software that hurts M$ I would take personal security very seriously!! Think about it, M$ doesnt have a whole other lot of choices.
why Microsoft ported Office and IE to the Mac platform They started Office on the Mac platform. They ported it to Windows. And as to why they still sell Office, it makes money. As for IE, I would guess that they could have a MS browser on a different OS (which, of course, begs MS's argument in the DOJ case that the browser is part of the OS- why is there IE for Mac, Unix, etc.).
The dancing paperclip is obsolete.
It's still an option in Office 2000, but there are a half dozen other "characters" that your help can be represented by.
I upgraded directly from Office 4.3 to Office 2000, so I skipped the mandatory Paperclip years.
I prefer the sun/planet. Like how it erupts a volcano (ala Simearth) when it wants attention.
I think you've got it exactly right. At companies where I have worked, Visio and Office were the only tools some managers used.
Next on the list should be Rational Rose to shore up the enterprise development side of things.
Kinda like the web browser, newreader, eliza program, etc. in Emacs, eh?
Oh, right, that's from the FSF. It's good bloat.
You delete the kernel source tarball before even building?
I'm afraid you just disqualified yourself for the bonus round.
I wouldn't be too suprised to see Microsoft incorperate their own version of something like Cygwin into a 32bit command shell
Such a thing already exists. Interix has sold a Posix API for Windows NT for several years now. It's a native subsystem, so runs alongside Win32, not on top of it, and talks directly to the NT kernel. It includes Bash, GCC and (professional version) Motif. There is an X11R6 ported to it (but eXceed is the way to go there) It's Posix compliant (not just 'kinda' like the freenixes). Interix licensed the NT source to take advange of the lowest level system calls, so it's not running on top of Win32 like Cygnus.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft bought Safeway Systems (makers of Interix) and integrated it into Windows 2000.
These people did not sign the contracts willingly. Read the Trial Transcripts. These people signed the contracts because if they didn't Microsoft would gouge them into bankruptcy.
And yet in many cases where companies didn't sign the contracts and belly up to Microsoft, they still got the MS operating system at a good rate and didn't go belly up. IBM is an example where this was the case. They played hardball with Microsoft and won. They were able to bundle Windows 95 on their systems even after Microsoft tried to arm-wrestle them into selling it exclusively.
Much of the evidence against Microsoft is crybabies and companies amplifying normal business practices (that every company engages in) into some sort of monstrous travesty.
The court case isn't gonna do anything significant against Microsoft. It shouldn't.
Actually, they came from Aldus............
Speaking as a visio Employee in Dublin, Ireland, Its kind of scary for us here. It looks like our development team will go, as will our Marketing,Facilities, maybe IS, Financial and about 45% of our QA team. Luckily (or maybe not) I am a localisation engineer, and there is a short supply of them here, so its an employee's market.....
But I dont even have a definite job, I have to wait 4½ months till Micro$oft 'offer' me a job, arse to that. I'll wait the 4½ months allright, take the bonus, refuse the job, take severance pay and have a new job in under 3 weeks,
Pity tho' I like working in Visio. Its fun.
To Boot we are about to move into a new building this friday. Now we Move alright, but we could be moved out of there, because its a really Kewl building and
the M$ A**holes might decide that, "Hey, we want to put the Fat Pigs from Marketing here, Out ya go guys, good luck and Fuck ya" and off we move, 10 miles outta the city to a horrible brown building built in the
late sixties.
and as regard the Guy above who said "Stop Whinig"
SCREW YOU
You try and look at you so called 'Job security' go slowly up the YingYang!
Timeto get the CV out
THALIA I NEED A JOB!!!
This is very sad. We will now have a design product that will only work with microsoft. Did they not have a strong bond with Novell on their api to access NDS objects? I will assume that either this will not work anymore or maybe Microsoft needs some help with their(nds duplicating) active directory?
But not with Visio - Visio also has IntelliCAD, the biggest threat to AutoCAD there is. It uses the dwg format natively, and can run nearly all existing AutoCAD customisation routines - and it is about 1/6th the price.
If you won't buy it when microsoft puts their tag on it, why buy it now?!? They just bought it, so don't you think you're giving your profits to microsoft anyway? Or were you planning on stealing it [the open source solution to software with a pricetag], so the only thing that matters is that it doesn't have a microsoft logo?
I understand perfectly having seen the benchmarks between the iMac and a comparable Pentium - the iMac version was slower to a ludicrous degree. Therefore M$ can say that the Mac platform is inferior to Windoze. If M$ weren't so intent in being all things PC, then Windows would be a far superior operating system and Intel would still be on the P166. Viva Linux and roll on KOffice.
http://SAL.KachinaTech.COM/index.shtml There's quite a bit on visualization software their.
That's a bit of an irrelevant comment, as I bet you still have to help your parents out with WinProbs, just like I have to help my dad out (and he's been using PCs since they came out). Give your mum a properly setup Linux desktop with KDE and she'll probably need a lot less help, plus no "the bloody things crashed and I've lost everything" complaints. The only thing more difficult in KDE is rebuilding the kernel, and that's because there isn't a nice user-friendly tool yet (and how often would the ordinary user need to do that). What's missing from Linux is support from the hardware community. Wouldn't it be great to be have a Linux driver on the same CD as the Windows ones. KDE provides just about everything required already, with StarOffice providing the Office software.
Encarta isn't being given away with every box of cereal.
"The product in question isn't an even an encyclopedia, but something called Encarta Virtual Globe." which requires internet explore and a ms authorized ISP.
To get the Virtual Globe product for free, you have to sign up for a month of MSN access.
So basically, it's just like AOL's offer to get a free trial month of their service, except that instead of
waiving the cost of the free month, they're sending you a software product.
As to your ranting about "GIVING AWAY PRODUCTS AND HOPEFULLY KILLING LINUX BY
SHUTTING NETSCAPE OUT OF THE MARKET":
" Microsoft doesn't have a browser for Linux." Duh. Thats my whole point.
"Netscape for Linux is free, as will be Mozilla. "
Which is costing Netscape oops I mean AOl millions of dollars to get nothing in return other then mindshare from unix users. You all know how screwed up Steve Case is. This man supports IE over its own netscaep navigator browser. He will do anything to get on the active desktop from microsoft. If Bill threatened to remove AOL from the channel bar, wouldn't Stever kill netscape to please Billy. I do not trust AOL.
"Please tell me again how they can shut Netscape out of a market"
Easy. Can you say dynamic DNS, NT domain security models, microsoft's TCP/ip, Microsoft Kerbos, CSS, etc. IF Bill can patent something like css or make windows clients only read html pages from secret ms implemntations of the ms tcp/ip then linux would die after the whole net switches to NT. As redicolus as this may sound, this is what Bill has planned since 1995. We all know it. Bill may also own stock in every cable and telephone compnay in exist to fullfill his mad vision of information controll. He allready owns or owns part of half of all the wires in the world. He can just buy NT in every ISP server from there after the cable/telephone companies force them to use NT wich only accepts calls from WIndows.
in which Microsoft itself doesn't
Oh yeah, and how will this kill Linux?
Even if, as you predict, Netscape/AOL decided to yank the Netscape browser from the market, it
doesn't change the fact that Mozilla (with source code) will probably be released within the next 12
months. If, after pulling out, Netscape/AOL decides to close up their flavor of an Open Source
license (which still wouldn't have any effect on the code which has already been written)" Well the mozzilla license is not a gnu one. Aol still owns the code.
"your opinions and predictions of what will happen, I'm talking about simple facts, known quantities, that
your mind has distorted."
Is bill or is he not buying out competitors and doing damage to the market place? That is the question.
Why M$ interests in Visio? Simple. As some of you may know, Visio once formed an independent organization called the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium (ITC) to collaborate openly with other vendors in the future development of IntelliCAD(R), Visio's Autodesk AutoCAD-compatible technology." [1] M$'s intention is simply to replace the IntelliCAD effort by replacing it with proprietary technology. Since IntelliCAD already compatible with 'most' of AutoCAD files, it wouldn't be hard for this company to crush both Autodesk and open source effort with one simple purchase.
------
[1] http://linuxtoday.com/stories/8127.html
One less thing to worry, if I am correct, there isn't another VISIO product out there. 3 million existing users for US$200 each ... not a bad buy.
Besides, to combat SUNW recent buy for StarOffice, they have to provide someting better than crap. Integrating VISIO into Office and bump the price tag for $20 each box, MSFT gets more revenue from Office business, and there customers are more happy, and they give their competitor a head start.
If you know any other company that produce the same sort of tools, let everyone know and be remeber to invest in it. SUNW is going to buy it.
Microsoft does or has had control in these areas. They just recentyl sold soft|image, the permier 3d modeler for video production which they had control over for the past couple year. Microsoft Publisher, whihc is on everyones desktop due to office2000 is quickly becoming a competitor for pagemaker. Image Composer, or whatever they're calling it today started as a basic image editor for frontpage but has grown into a photoshop like program. I could do all of my daily tasks using nothing but microsoft products if I chose to. There isn't a single common task that can't be done, or written, using a microsoft product.
I love all these comments that are to the effect "Well I thought it was a really good piece of software, guess I can't use it anymore because I hate Microsoft so much that I can't bring myself to use one of their products because I might actually like it, or even think that (gasp!) Microsoft makes something good" gimme a break. You're all acting like a bunch of five year olds. Eww, I'm not gonna use this cause Billy made it.
visio has been in bed w/ MS forever.
They have used OLE/OCX/COM stuff as
soon as it came out and was a reference customer
in all the developer PR stuff.
I personally think Rational software is next
target for MS. They are in bed w/ them too,
and more garbage to add to MSDEV to jack up
the price. Can you say "Universal Enterprise
Edition" or some crap like that
Visio make a useful program, that integrates well with office. They stick with the newest MS trends (I refuse to call them innovations) and work with MS. They were practically in MS's pocket for years before being bought out.
This is probably a good thing for users of office and Visio, integration is bound to become tighter, but its bad news for those who want Visio for Linux.
A decent vector graphics program is pretty much the only non-games thing I really miss in Linux
Roll on Dia and/or CorelDraw/Linux
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
They can't. Only a small fraction of Red Hat stock was sold in the IPO.
Actually, unless it can be shown that they're trying to extend their monopoly to prevent others from entering the market, it's perfectly legal. Let's remember, having a monopoly is not illegal in the U.S. Using it to stifle competition is, which is basically what the DOJ is charging Microsoft with.
Now, if Microsoft had the 2nd most popular business diagramming package and tried to buy Visio, you'd have a whole different ballgame. Here's where the fact that they have a monopoly in one area can prevent them from doing things in another. This is exactly why they weren't allowed to purchase Intuit; it was seen as an attempt to eliminate competition in an area where they had tried (and failed) to gain a majority marketshare.
Problem is, it would be a really hard sell to gov't regulators. There is a long history of these types of market consolidations, and invariably the gov't stays out of it unless it gets ridiculous. After all, it's fairly easy to show that these things benefit the consumer short term, and difficult to show the long term damage.
Pan Am back in the early part of the century, and RCA in about the same time frame, are two excellent examples of times the gov't stayed hands off when they probably should have gotten involved. While both of these companies 'got theirs' in the end, they did a very good job of stomping competition flat (and all the innovations that come with it) for several decades first.
As far as the legality goes, if Microsoft's intent in buying Visio is to leverage (blech; hate that word) the Windows monopoly in order to gain the same dominance in the productivity market that they have in the 'office suite' market (which, as you pointed out, they basically created for the purpose), then yes, that's illegal. Again, though, the legality is basically defined by intent. Keeping in mind that most people don't believe that giving away IE and integrating it into Windows was done to kill Netscape, I have little hope that anyone's going to do anything about it.
The whole thing's kind of depressing, actually.
Dia is a program that is quite similar. It doesn't have all the functionality of Visio (yet), but it's early days. Still, I've heard several people swear by it. Check it out.
...that Visio would get a dancing paper clip?
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Now I'm going to have to see a Microsoft building
on the way to work. that bites.
A friend asked me whether this was good or bad. I wasn't really sure -- maybe Microsoft wants to roll it into Office or Visual Whatever or something, maybe they'll fuck it up, who knows.
.eps output into typeset LaTeX for that FrameMaker look) for free with little hassle. The architecture is meant to allow Visio-like plugins for transforming SQL to ER diagrams and vice versa, although AFAIK no one has implemented it (I started to look into it and got distracted).
But one thing is for sure. Dia, for any Unix that can build GTK+, is a great tool and in combination with LyX can produce truly professional results (embedding the dia
Check it out:
Dia, a diagram creation program
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
How much longer will it be before every company that puts out a good product is snapped up by Microsoft? I agree that this is a good move for Microsoft, but I can't help but wonder if there will be only two types of companies supporting the home PC market; those that are MS, and those that are killing themselves trying to compete with MS. Diversity of applications has alway been the strong suit of Windows and DOS. If this keeps up, it might weaken Microsofts dominance as companies move to a less hostile environment. (One can hope. :) )
If you log in, you can remove articles from certain posters
However, I fail to see why this is an issue. After all, it IS technology based, and it does have an affect on the computing industry as a whole.
But I'm afraid you're just a TROLL.
oh well...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
I guess we now have all the more incentive to hack on Dia, then.
Matthew.
Don't forget, Microsoft can also use this as a path to get nice Big-Brother features onto the Macintosh platform, like GUIDs, and NSAKeys, and software that won't function if you move the folder it's in to another folder.
Also, another flanking maneuver on Java, by moving MSJava (IE's JVM) to the Mac platform.
I just don't understand why IE Mac doesn't do CaptiveX yet. Come on MS! We need another dozen or so cryptically named libraries of fragile code in our extensions folder!
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
naw. Microsoft will just ressurect Xenix.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yet another toy that they will probrably end up throwing into Office at some point, at least the buisness edition..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I visited Visio in Seattle for a developer course about a year ago, and quite frankly, I'm not surprised that they would be bought by Microsoft, given the MS-heavy atmosphere there.
The acquisition of Visio should also strike fear into the hearts of Autodesk Inc, considering that they will now face direct competition from MS in the 3D cad market via Visio's IntelliCAD.
It's licensed per machine, with no option for site licensing or concurrent use from a server. That means that when people mail us round visio attachments, I can't see them, 'coz my department doesn't have the budget to put Visio on everyone's desk. A concurrent use license would be ideal, because it's not something we all use all the time...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Could it be that MS purchased Visio for the same reason they created Office?
Because there is too much competition in the current market. Now if you want Visio, you get MS Office. You can't get Visio for a reasonable price outside of Office, nor are there any competing products available outside of the MS Office solution.
...Just like years ago it was best to pick up that silly Word program with that copy of Excel. Hey, it's not Wordperfect, but it uses that new-fangled MS GUI... and 1-2-3 just won't run anymore.
On the upside, maybe Sun will throw support into DIA :-)
It's all about the money.
Interestingly enough, within the past two years, Visio acquired InfoModelers. InfoModelers chief product was InfoModeler, a data diagramming tool that used Object Role Modeling, a relatively obscure diagramming notation. The InfoModeler technology was integrated into Visio Enterprise last year
Anyway, InfoModelers was once part of Asymetrix, and we all know who put a lot of money into Asymetrix - Paul Allen!
So, InfoModeler starts at Asymetrix, leaves home, gets bought by Visio and is now part of Microsoft. Paul Allen is a genius!
I'd always hoped that DigiDesign would bring thier killer music tools to Linux, but I never hear hide nor hair of anything except the big NT push they are doing. This explains the whole thing...
if ((DigiDesign == Avid)&&(Avid == Microsoft))
{
$linuxProTools = FALSE;
$corruptedMusicData = TRUE;
}
That sucks. But thanks for the info.
It would also be illegal due to licensing agreements and contractual obligations Microsoft maintains with SCO.
"You know, for years, I couldn't quite figure out why Microsoft ported Office and IE to the Mac platform, and to be honest, it's a bit puzzling to me still." Three reasons: profit, market share & mind share. MS Office for Mac is a big revenue source paying back far more then it costs to develop & support. Furthermore remember that products like Word were originally built to be cross-platform; indeed they used to be built off of the same interpreted-code base. Unfortunately this resulted in a butt-ugly/slow/awkward Mac Word 5 so they may have diverged for Mac Word 98 (which interestingly is way nicer then PC Word 97 and even PC Word 2000.) MS Office for the Mac also allows MS to compete in the mixed Wintel/Mac marketplace. Lots of companies/schools/research organizations/etc. have Macs in place. If MS couldn't support them then they might have gone with (horrors) WordPerfect, or later, Corel Office. Thus MS was willing to go to bat with decent Mac versions to keep its competition from getting a toehold anywhere. Finally, why IE and OE? Market share and mind share. If MS sells Office for the Mac then it needs to approximate the web-abilities it offers on the PC platform. This is easiest achieved by using the same techniques it uses on the PC side - a closely tied web-browser and mail client. This of course also has the side effect of blunting Netscape's market penetration (a plus in MS's playbook.) Then there's the content-creator issue: A disproportionate amount of web and other high-visibility material is prepared on Macs. If MS couldn't produce a credible browser and such then those folks would insist on also developing for the browsers they use - Netscape. By providing an MS alternative it weakens any cross-browser development argument and can seduce intra-net managers and such with a standardised all-MS environment. -- Michael
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Three reasons: profit, market share & mind share.
MS Office for Mac is a big revenue source paying back far more then it costs to develop & support. Furthermore remember that products like Word were originally built to be cross-platform; indeed they used to be built off of the same interpreted-code base. Unfortunately this resulted in a butt-ugly/slow/awkward Mac Word 5 so they may have diverged for Mac Word 98 (which interestingly is way nicer then PC Word 97 and even PC Word 2000.)
MS Office for the Mac also allows MS to compete in the mixed Wintel/Mac marketplace. Lots of companies/schools/research organizations/etc. have Macs in place. If MS couldn't support them then they might have gone with (horrors) WordPerfect, or later, Corel Office. Thus MS was willing to go to bat with decent Mac versions to keep its competition from getting a toehold anywhere.
Finally, why IE and OE? Market share and mind share. If MS sells Office for the Mac then it needs to approximate the web-abilities it offers on the PC platform. This is easiest achieved by using the same techniques it uses on the PC side - a closely tied web-browser and mail client. This of course also has the side effect of blunting Netscape's market penetration (a plus in MS's playbook.) Then there's the content-creator issue: A disproportionate amount of web and other high-visibility material is prepared on Macs. If MS couldn't produce a credible browser and such then those folks would insist on also developing for the browsers they use - Netscape. By providing an MS alternative it weakens any cross-browser development argument and can seduce intra-net managers and such with a standardised all-MS environment.
-- Michael
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
They own Avid, which makes SoftImage. They yanked all of their logos off of Avid's web site a while ago when they realized how badly it was hurting Avid's image. But they are still the second largest shareholder in Avid.
Microsoft *is* into 3D rendering.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
That's putting it mildly.
When I think of companies that are in bed with Microsoft, three immediately come to mind: Symantec, Visio, and Rational. All three have been widely quoted as supporters of MS in the trial and before.
Symantec's former CEO Gordon Eubanks was mostly discredited while testifying for them when it was revealed that MS was feeding him the lines to say to secure favorable deals for the company.
Ted Johnson from Visio has always jumped at the bit when the press wanted a quote about how wonderful it was that Microsoft's monopoly was creating standards in the industry. Which makes sense, because now Visio will be the standard Office diagramming tool, so I guess he's not a hypocrite!. Visio is also one of the founding members of the Association for Competitive Technology, an industry group formed to support MS in the trial that has widely been rumored to be a shadow group funded and directed by MS.
It really calls into question the motives of those companies that claim to be independently supporting MS in the media. And I'd hardly be surprised if Symantec or Rational weren't acquired in the future.
On the upside, everytime MS does this they create a whole new industry of enemies.
Visio is a founding member of an effort to have AutoCAD open its DWG standard (see Open DWG). I wonder what will happen now.
/.ers, it was reported that Visio was going to release its code for IntelliCAD 2000. See this article from upfront.eZine. The IntelliCAD Technology Consortium (ITC) supposedly will have a website up and running (www.intellicad.org) soon, but now, who knows?
As has been noted by several
Finally, there is an OpenCAD effort that can be found here.
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
It will be very intereesting to see what happens with ITC. My twitching knee tells me the FTC will have them sell all Icad stuff off, or at least cut the ITC loose. Or complete the burial and cover the corpse with loam.
And remember, ITC is to open source what Sun's community source is to GPL. You pay to belong and they still hold the copyright.
The more interesting piece is the OpenDWG Alliance. Will it have a life of its own? What will MS/Visio's role be going forward. Very, very interesting.
No, you're not far off.
My first experience with Visio was with a sample version that was shipped on a Microsoft marketing floppy (extoling the virtues of upgrading to Windows for Workgroups) around, I think, 1992. The Visio app was limited to single page drawings but good enough that I used it for about four years. It, along with the copy of Tetrahex, were the only worthwhile things on the floppy. In those days, even the full version of Visio wasn't much more than a simple flowchart/org chart/block diagram/floor plan drawing tool.
Visio was trying to become more ``high-end'' and then they decided to buy a network diagramming package, whose name escapes me at the moment, from Microsystems Engineering Corp. (the people who wrote the MASS-11 word processor for the PDP-11s). It was considered the Cadillac of network drawing packages. We used this package at a large bank that I used to work for and it was used, reportedly, by some of the larger telecomm firms to diagram their networks (our's was global and damned complicated). The number of images for network equipment was incredible and updates came out whenever a vendor introduced new hardware. Until they bought MEC's software, when using Visio you were more often than not just creating block diagrams with labels; the included``icons'' were awfully generic and, generally, crappy-looking. Personally, I find the simple block diagrams entirely satisfactory but some people like the fancier drawings (they're just too ``busy'' for my taste and I always end up writing on them which would render the fancier drawings almost unreadable).
Visio was getting to be a darned BIG package as of a couple of years ago (last time I installed a version of it). If Visio is going to become part of Office, um, how many CDs will the entire Office package ship on? How much disk space you need? Will Macrosoft begin shipping a 2GB hard disk and cable along with the Office suite?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Nor was web publishing when they bought Vermeer to get Frontpage...
This seems to be standard modus operandi for Micros~1: Instead of creating technology they buy the companies that have the technology they want.
What benefits would this bring Micro$oft? Not exqctly their core business, is it...
You can trust Microsoft to bloat the thing full of "features" you probably never need :-)
Okay, so probably there will never come a Linux port of this software now. Are there any alternatives?
Don't you recognize sarcasm when you see it?
:-)
Look closely for the hidden tags
the hidden tags I mean :-P
I guess this is what Gates meant when he said :-)
"Microsoft must be free to innovate".
[Insert pithy quote here]
I thought MacIE did ActiveX (it certainly does OLE with Office) -- only that since ActiveX is binary, the objects need to be mac-specific or -urk- ActiveX coded in Java.
(This knowledge comes from hitting a Microsoft web page long ago on my IIfx and watching IE3 unexpectedly quit.)
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
These people did not sign the contracts willingly. Read the Trial Transcripts. These people signed the contracts because if they didn't Microsoft would gouge them into bankruptcy.
Yes, I agree that anybody can write there own software and use it, but that's not what most people want to do. Most people want to buy software that others have written, that's why there is a market. But if they can't buy the software because MS has told resellers that they can't get licenses for Windows unless they bundle X with it, then that's a monopoly.
Yes, we shouldn't be dependant on Windows. But it happened. There used to be choice of DOS vendors. But Microsoft was able to kill that off with Windows because noone had an OS that ran Windows apps. Oh, except for IBM, and Microsoft forced IBM to eitehr not preload OS/2 or lose the deal to license Windows. There was a complacency in the market at that time which let MS get away with these "business" practices while we weren't watching. And this is what we end up with.
It must never happen that we fail to be alert to Microsoft's "business" practices. We must be vigilant. Microsoft *will* do it again. But this time let's be ready. Windows DNA is just around the corner...
-Brent--
The DoJ actually brought out the real issues very well. But remember 2 things. The issues that the trial dealt with were limited because the Judge didn't want the trial to go on forever. So the DoJ had to leave out the petty issues. The other thing is that it is Microsoft who's largely the only one (Except for the "microsoft" press) that's claiming that the DoJ did a poor job bringing out the real issues. There'd better not be any surprise there :-)
This isn't like a football game where the winning time congratulates the loser for the great game they played. Microsoft is the loser and they only "victory" they'll get is to try to make the winner look bad.
Microsoft's defense was *really* bad. In fact, the only defense that Microsoft really had was PR. I think they were counting on the courts really not being able to do enough even if they lost to hurt them. Therefore, they didn't need to bother defending themselves in court. When they lose, a bunch of PR, and Jesse Berst's help will "fix" it all up with their customers. They'll be the winner. The verdict against them will be explained as "the judge just didn't understand the case". And Microsoft will always be right.
-Brent--
The article stated that Microsoft bought Visio as part of their Internet strategy. Huh? Sometimes I wish those reporters would spend a little bit of time to understand what they are writing.
Ok, here is my take. Microsoft bought Visio for its leverage into the graphics market. Corel is a sore spot for Microsoft. They want to keep Corel on life support so that there appears to be competition. But with Visio Microsoft is building a proper graphics package. Look at what Office is today.
It means that for Sun to compete, it must include other features as well. This is going to be tough for them.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
The effect that Microsoft's purchase has on a company which has previously voiced pro-Open Source ideas is certianly relevant to consideration for the majority of the /. community.
Perhaps if there is interest, we should sponsor a project request on CoSource and see if we can get some funding for an OpenSource replacement.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Coincidentally, I've been beating my head against a wall this morning due to Visio crashing when I try to edit an object embedded in MS Word. Of course, the crash corrupts the object and I loose the work... (I know, don't use Word. Not my choice, unfortunately!)
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
...except that Microsoft just purchased Visio. Oops.
MS was, at one point, trying to push their own image editing software (free with your purchase of FrontPage!), but it was so annoying to use that it never took off.
(this is admittedly a bit off-topic)
MS ported Office and IE to the MAC 'cause they own part of Apple.
This whole "M$ owns part of Apple" concept is blown out of proportion. _I_ own part of Apple too, and even have more say than MS does with respect to voting in stockholder meetings etc. My point here is that M$ is a non-voting shareholder, not some nefarious big brother pulling Steve Job's strings.
M$ has a Mac version of office becuase:
1. There is a market for it.
2. They need to look like they're playing nice for anti-trust reasons.
3. They get good GUI insights for Windows by working closely with Apple.
(Remember, Excel, PowerPoint and the GUI version of Word were all Mac apps before they came to the Windows platform. They even hired an early Mac GUI whiz, Steve Capps, back in the mid 90's)
As far as M$ purchasing Visio, they did it because for reasons we are all familiar with:
They can't innovate internally, and therefore need to purchase innovation.
Uh oh, am I standing on a soapbox?
-t
MS ported Office and IE to the MAC 'cause they own part of Apple. Not a hard motive to figure out.
--Hired Net Grunt
What about gtk-- (gtk+ C++ wrapper) as an option for C++ development in a Gnomish environment? I haven't tried it yet, as I am just as comfortable using straight C, but it seems like something worth looking into if you want to use C++.
If Microsoft decides they want to play in the *nix world, its more likely that Microsoft would just buy out Novell, AT&T and the Micheal's shares of SCO, which would give them pretty close to a controlling interest in SCO, if not outright majority ownership. They could then do whatever they wanted when it came to attempts at co-opting the *nix market. Or they could just try to screw around with the licenses of the commercial *nixes. Or they could kill/maim the Monterey project (64 bit UNIX for IA-64). Or they could do all of the above.
Microsoft obviously believes that they will either win the current case, or that if they lose the case, the penalty will be negligible, or that they can afford to fight another case should one come up (or when one does).
Given how poorly the DOJ brought out the real issues that should have been used against Microsoft, I can understand why Microsoft seems to feel so little threat from them.
I wasn't suggesting that SCO would be a big Linux competitor (because I agree with you there -- I don't think there is any good reason why a home or most small business users would choose SCO over Linux anymore). I merely think that if Microsoft decided they wanted to get out from under contractual obligations to SCO in regards to their entry into the *nix market, they could easily afford to just buy SCO out and make it a non-issue.
Nah, its not really flamebait (at least it is put politely and coherently). I think there is room for rational discussion, including disagreements. What we don't need are the "'huh-huh... **** sucks... huh-huh huh-huh' 'heh-heh, yea, and it sucks too. heh-heh-heh'" type of comments.
I am not really that familiar with QT, and am only familar with KDE from the end-user standpoint so I can't say for sure, but would it be possible to make a more QT/KDE like C++ binding that worked with GTK+ as the underlying widget set? If not, maybe you can come up with your own C++ bindings for GTK+ that you were more comfortable with than GTK--? Maybe you could just suggest some improvements to the GTK-- bindings?
If the QT/KDE and GTK+/Gnome communities are going to start working together, whatever we can do to facilitate compatibility and communication between us is a good thing, IMO.
Cool! Score one for the spirit of cooperation! You sound like someone who could really provide some positive feedback to the GTK+ and GTK-- developers, so please make sure you send back any ideas/patches/comments you have to them. I am hoping that they will take advantage of this if you do.
The DoJ actually brought out the real issues very well.
Actually, I think that the issues the DoJ brought out were presented pretty well, I just think that they spent too much time talking about browsers and didn't bring up or didn't spend enough time on some other things (OS license agreements, databases, etc) that were as, or more important.
The other thing is that it is Microsoft who's largely the only one (Except for the "microsoft" press) that's claiming that the DoJ did a poor job bringing out the real issues.
Well, it looks more to me like Microsoft (and their apologists) is/are claiming that there either are no issues to be brought up or that the issues that were brought up aren't important (and that isn't what I was saying -- I just believe a lot of important issues didn't get covered). The last thing Microsoft would want to say is that there were relevant complaints against them that weren't brought up.
Microsoft's defense was *really* bad.
Here you are absolutely correct. I'd be really upset if I was paying what Microsoft was for legal fees and I got such poor defense. Microsoft seriously bungled things and seemed ill-prepared, which they should not have given their resources. I would tend to concur that Microsoft must not have taken this whole case very seriously. Unfortunately, I think that they may be justified in this because I suspect that the judgement against them will lack enough teeth to make any real difference at this late date.
That means that those of us that would oppose Microsoft (or at least want to see them kept in check to a certain degree) must remain vigilant.
If I get some free time, I will be working on a companion library to GTK that does all the non-gui support tasks like threads and sockets in a portable, OO way.
Cool. There are already a few C++ wrappers around POSIX threads and Berkeley Sockets which you might be able to use as a starting point. If you can build on something else, then all you have to do is make it fit within the GTK+/Gnome architecture.
Safeway Systems
I think that you mean Softway Systems. While this sort of product (Cygwin32, MKS Toolkit, etc) probably make NT more palatable for some *nix orriented power users as a desktop OS, I don't see it as doing too much to help make NT a more viable enterprise solution in the server room. Call me crazy, but adding more stuff (especially from a 3rd party) to an already bloated environment doesn't seem like a good way to reduce bloat or improve stability. Those are two of the main things that Microsoft is getting beat up on in the server world.
I'm not so sure that running as a separate subsystem instead of on top of Win32 is necessarily that great a thing (at least not if its exclusively so), as that is one of the great failings of the built-in POSIX subsystem of NT (not being able to mix and match *nix and Windows stuff easily). Licensing the NT source is kinda a dangerous thing for a small company like Softway. They should closely at what has happened to companies like Citrix and Bristol who based their future on such agreements.
Man I am so damm pissed about that and I can't just write what I feel about it. It just sucks. I really did feel Visio was a pretty good reason to use Windoze cause it was a really nice and useful piece of software. And it does suck because Microsoft strategy with companies that made more succesful software than theirs is:
1) Beat them with a new product, add a really big, impressive publicity campaign based on crappy vaporware, force hardware manufactures to bundle the software and all this using unethical business tactics.
2) If that did not made it, buy the company and then close it down. Im not shure but I think that's what happened with Intuit after MS Money lost the battle against their software, even when they gave it away free.That's they way it has been and I am sorry to predict that will be what will happen to Visio.
I am really starting to believe Bill Gates is the Antichrist or at least something alike. If I recall, his "mission in life" is "..to put a computer in every home..", but with an attitude like that, I think he should add "..with really bad and crappy software that I think you deserve, so you suffer everytime you want to do your job, your homework, to have a little fun playing a game, to find something on the net, everytime my software and I will be there to make shure you suffer and to make shure you don't do what you have to do in time and in a easy way. We wont let you" . He is truly a prophet from hell.
BILL PLEASE IF YOU ARE READING BY ANY CHANCE THIS, STOP DOING THAT!, LEAVE THE INDUSTRY ALONE!!, ENOUGH DAMAGE HAS BEEN DONE!!! HOW MANY MORE MONEY DO YOU NEED!!! RETIRE!!!! OK WE GET IT, YOU WON !! GO HAVE FUN, TAKE A PERMANENT VACATION AND WE'LL PROMISE WE WILL STOP TROWING PIES TO YOUR FACE!!!!
Look up DIA on www.freshmeat.net.
It was at 0.4 last I saw, or something... hope the guy's still working on it, it was really slick 6 months ago!
mindslip
Having used both QT and GTK--, my opinion is that I like GTK-- better, mainly because I also code in C for smaller apps, and I want a consistant widget set. (QT/C bindings were just to prove it can be done, they suck to actually use -- I have never seen a real app developed with them). The big advantage for QT is that it does a *LOT* more, stuff like socket objects, and various things you would not strictly consider to be part of a widget set. If I get some free time, I will be working on a companion library to GTK that does all the non-gui support tasks like threads and sockets in a portable, OO way.
I hate to tell you this, but at least one of Visio's VPs came FROM Micro$oft.
:-)
They've been talking about this for over 2 years.
AND Visio has been (at least since version 3) one of the few companies that M$ "gives their notes to". WHY DO YOU THINK THE THING WAS SO BLOODY STABLE?
As for Bloat, sure, there's bound to be some. But until people like my mom can run Linux (read: needs a much lower learning curve), M$ is the way of the world. Sorry.
-Markvs
...If the world put its energies into actual work instead of complaining, think of where we'd be.
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
I suppose our chances of having Visio ported to Linux have just decreased to about zero. Not that it was something I was particularly waiting for, but it would have been nice. Instead it's going to get integrated into Office 2002 ProfessionalDeveloperNonsense addition. Bleah.
Is that possible? I'm an idiot when it comes to the market,
but what if they just decided to buy 75% of Red Hat's stock or something?
Wouldn't that give them control of the publicly traded company?
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
> CAD/CAM
The buy of Visio just gave them IntelliCAD, a pretty comprehensive clone of AutoCAD. (Were I AutoDesk, I'd be nervous. I suppose AutoDesk could try to revive its Unix version, but they can kiss goodbye to kilobuck-per-seat licensing).
-- Alastair
Most folks are commenting on the obvious connection with Visio's eponymous diagramming package, which does make a nice (for MS) addition to their Office suite, a partial countermove to Sun's making StarOffice gratis. (Does StarOffice include anything Visio-like?)
However, on a second front, Visio also owns a CAD software package (IntelliCAD?) that is fully AutoCAD compatible, right down to running AutoLisp macros, reading/writing the latest DXF files, etc.
(The history goes back a bit - SoftDesk originally wrote the ACAD clone so AutoDesk bought them out, but DOJ required them to spin off the ACAD-like software (anti-monopoly move) which they sold to an obscure Australian company that Visio later bought. Confused yet?)
In addition to an add-on for Office, and ensuring that Visio never gets ported to Linux, MS now owns a package that can (and will, count on it) compete with AutoCAD. (Not that AutoCAD, at a thousand dollars or so per seat, couldn't use some competition - but it already had that without MS buying the Visio company.) It also ensures that IntelliCAD (am I getting the right package name?) is never ported to Linux.
This is a very clever strategic move for Microsoft, equivalent to capturing a couple of key pieces in shogi (unlike chess, in shogi you can place captured pieces on the board as your own).
So, what open/free CAD packages are in development out there? And what visio-like diagramming packages? Time to get coding....
-- Alastair
Microsoft strikes again.. "Visio is slated to be a division within Microsoft's Business Productivity Group." Sounds like they're going to shovel it in with Office Pro or something.. I imagine that companies that use both products will be happy, until Microsoft manages to screw it up. What's next? Autodesk? Could happen.
Bitchslapped. Neat.
I used that eval copy a lot during my undergrad, i.e. flow charts, net diagrams, etc.
Doesn't Corel have a similar tool. I'm not sure here but if so they might port it to Linux as they are currently doing with their other products.
Jilles
You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Freedom is irrelevant. Standards are irrelevant. All software companies will be assimilated into the Microsoft collective.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
There go our chances for a Linux version of Visio.
A few days after you said this, MS did buy Softway Systems and its Interix.
How many Red Hat shares would old Bill
need to buy?
I can see him now, hand in the petty cash
drawer.
This is truly disheartening news.
I use Visio in my work regularly, for documenting network structures. Visio *used to* have a free add-on - the Visio Solution Pack for NDS. This product could be added on to Visio 5.0 and permitted an administrator to diagram NDS trees easily, by importing live data into a Visio chart. With the release of the Visio Enterprise (priced $600 higher than the previous professional versions) this functionality was 'embraced and extended' - the free product was withdrawn. The new product does include MS Active Directory and NT Domain structures but does not seem to include any enhancements to the functionality of the free NDS Solution Pack. I cannot help but believe that MS will either direct the removal of the NDS functionality altogether or inhibit any future enhancements - it is not in MS's best interests to sell a product that enhances a competing directory-enabled network.
Enhancements/features I'd like to see:
-better online/offline directory reporting and prototyping similar to DS Standard (and don't get me started on CA...)
-better performance when charting trees with large numbers of objects
-improved charting of NDS partitions
-the ability to easily chart server relationships (such as timesync provider groups)
Anyone know of a competing product that includes such functionality (Dia perhaps?)
I also note with disappointment that the new version of the Standard and Technical Editions is 'Visio 2000' - a logical precursor to its inclusion in Office 2001 I suppose. Does the year-based numbering scheme make sense for anyone but marketing?
The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life
They could have been bought out by Computer Associates.
Visio would then be renamed DrawIT or something simillar, and then have CAs terrible software licensing added to it, which basically prevents the software from running until a 70 character keycode is typed in.
L1NUX is not M$ bug-compliant enough yet. Although Caldera is getting close. Actually, RedHat isn't far behind Caldera in bug compliance. GNOME needs to crash unexpectedly more often. SuSE looks promising, if only from a national origin standpoint (Linus ist unser fUrer, ja!), but they lack the aforementioned bugs.
No sig.
Visio is most famous in the Seattle area for their bus-side ads looking for programmers. They scream:
43 guitar players
13 marathon runners
0 pocket protectors
I was always tempted to go for an interview wearing a pocket protector... but the fact remains that I was tempted to go for an interview.
I think the Seattle location is definitely a factor in this purchase. And that's a bad sign for the engineering-job ecosystem up here. As soon as a Seattle-area software company gets successful, M$ makes them an offer they can't refuse. Whether or not you hate microsoft in particular, it's sad that yet another unique culture is being "embraced". That's one option fewer for the Puget Sound software engineer.
I'll be wearing my pocket protector to work tomorrow in mourning.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
For the consumer:
*IF* you use Microsoft products (and if you use Visio, chances are you do) then this may be good for you. AFAIK, Visio has no plans to do other platforms anyway - and they were way deep into the Office model. I don't see how they could do other platforms without a major re-write. The Office integration has been a nice feature, if you're an Office user. I can only imagine MS would make that more so. I expect Visio would become a piece of one of the Office flavors? We can even hope the cost will go down.
For Microsoft:
There is a little bit of a hole in their product lineup this fills nicely. It even functions as a baby CAD package. There is a Pro version that does things like network autodiscovery and database diagramming (Informix and Oracle at present, no Sybase or MS SQL. I imagine the latter will be fixed soon) which is a new market for MS. It's not like Visio was competeing with anything at MS, and it's very complimentary to lots of MS products. Heck, MS probably just wants the revenue.
For the general populace/Anti-MS crowd:
Well, it's yet another good product that is no owned by MS. I suspect some folks would have written it off anyway, given how heavily MS/Office it is. Overall, I don't think it changes much. MS owns one more particular market. That marekt was previosuly owned by Visio, so at least they didn't kill anyone off.
Visio has always been totally useless for network diagramming as IMHO it is missing a key feature.
.....
MUTILAYER - DRILL DOWN
I tried this again with the latest release and it still doesn't do it easily or automatically.
If you want to do good, multilayer network digrams then the only usefull tool I've found is
NETVIZ : http://www.netviz.com
It even exports to mutilayer HTML - including all the inter-diagram links.
This means you can start at a state level, showing just city/town blobs with WAN links between them, and then DRILL DOWN into the city/town blobs to se the buildings and then into the buildings to see the routers and then into
aahhhhh stop me !
in any case , I'm quite thankful M$oft didn't buy NETVIZ.
There are always some interesting implications when Microsoft decides to buy out a company for their product, implications that should interest the Linux community. Whenever a company is bought out by Microsoft, my assumption is that any sort of a Linux port is out of the question. Is this right? I'm not up on my anti-trust laws, but this seems like snuffing out the competition by owning the market that supports the competition. Much like Barnes & Noble couldn't buy up all the book warehouses in the company to put Amazon out of business, it seems like there should be checks in place to keep Microsoft from buying up all the application "warehouses."
You know, for years, I couldn't quite figure out why Microsoft ported Office and IE to the Mac platform, and to be honest, it's a bit puzzling to me still. But the purchase by Microsoft shouldn't surprise anyone. Someone's already noted that they have some very tight integration with MS Office, Visio was started by ex-Microsoft employees, plus the Vision offices are in Seattle! I'm just surprised this didn't happen sooner -- Microsoft could've paid less than the $1.6B they coughed up.
--jeddz
I think they're just continuing their expansionistic policy -- it's a market they haven't conquered yet, so they want it. They're already snuggly with Visio, so purchase makes sense.
I doubt that they view StarOffice as competition -- the only thing it has going for it is that it runs on Linux (sort of) and reads/writes MSOffice formats (sort of). It's slow and crash-prone, SOffice on my P200/64MB reminds me of WordPerfect 6.1 on my 486-33/4MB, 5 years ago.
Now if Corel ports the whole PerfectOffice suite to Linux, they may get worried. If Lotus ports SmartSuite, they'll definitely be a little worried -- but not too much, because they've succeeded in making MSOffice file formats the de facto standard in almost every industry (please don't waste bandwidth responding to let everyone know that your dinky company doesn't use MSOffice file formats because MS sux and you're too cheap or poor to buy commercial software -- no one cares). And if Sun succeeds in making SOffice a true network app, they'll definitely be worried. But what's most likely to happen is:
Sun will run SOffice into the ground -- they'll issue two "network-enabled" betas (Q2'00 and Q1'01), then formally halt development by H2'01.
Corel will have a fully native Linux office suite for Perfect Office 9, which will capture and keep ~40% of the emerging Linux desktop market -- a brief return to the days when no one's file formats match.
A startup will produce an MSOffice look-and-work-alike for Linux which sells for $49/seat and takes the other 40% of the desktop market. (Must remember the 10% who won't give up vi, emacs, or clay tablets, and the 10% who run the latest beta of the Next Big Thing.)
Too much coffee? Nonsense! What are you trying to say?
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
I've used Visio for years, and while I've loved it, there have been a few features I've been asking for, but have never gotten.
Finally, with Microsoft at the helm, I'm sure to get the things I've been needing to work productively. My needs are simple and few: increased instability, bloat, and improved incompatibility.
I was beginning to wonder if I was asking for too much from Visio, and I guess I was. But Microsoft has the background necessary to deliver. Hallelujia!
Well, it looks like 5.0 will be last version I will be buying. This really sucks, Visio was one of the only things I had left that I would run under VMware :). Any suggestions for a replacement, it wouldn't have to be open sourced.
I wonder why Visio's mgmt isn't as passionate about their product as you all. If it is known that MS is going to ruin the product, relegate it to a mere Office 98 add-in, introduce nothing but feature bloat, etc... wouldn't Visio's people be as smart as most of the /.'ers here?
You guys are a bit much at times. I, for one, like: the COM-enabled Microsoft suite of products, the common look-and-feel, the larger audience that will come as a result of Microsoft's distribution (thus the great number of supporters), and the probable lower price. Have you guys PRICED Visio Technical lately?
Stop bashing for the sake of bashing and open your eyes a little bit. If Microsoft DOES trash it, you have no one to blame but Visio themselves.
Yeah, Dia will rock when it's done. Wow! They've added a LOT of stuff since the last CVS snapshot I grabbed. Does anyone know when the next release will be?
While we're talking about non-MS productivity apps, I'd like to also mention that
MagicPoint
rocks!
Heh.
/proc and /dev (can't let users know too much) and on top of it all, they'd mess with memory so that you keep running out of it. Then they'd finish it off by making the default shell their own variant of mc.
This couldve become a 2 or 3 (funny) if you had just developed the idea...
gcc needs to crash more often too, right in the middle of important builds. patch won't work right either, leaving you with a mangled kernel and you and your trusty 28.8 have to go redownload the 15MB sourceball again... (grr) M$ would dump all virtual terminals and get rid of
Oh. Wait. If they just flip the / around, they'd have DOS. But I wouldn't put that past them. They'd repackage it a MS Unix and sell it to the newbies who are trying to jump on the bandwagon and who still believe that MS writes for their best interests.
From a motherboard manual, error beep codes: S-L-L-L-SS: Speaker Error
I think you'll find that it's a lot easier to write in a decent OO environment than it was to port a NeXTSTEP app to windoze. Visio suffered greatly from the platform. -jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
> Pagemaker
:)
There is MS Publisher.
I don't know for the others, but I think MS and Adobe have some kind of deal. (Who knows, maybe MS will buy Adobe once Adobe is done eating the graphic/desktop publishing market
Visio took great pains to integrate their software into MS Office, and so MS probably recognised it and decided to go all the way with it.
This is one product I don't mind MS touching. As far as designing flowcharts and presentations goes, MS does OK. I just wish they'd stick to that instead of trying to design operating systems. :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
This is horrible news. Not only because it shows Microsoft gaining a ready-made venture in another sector of the computing industry and Visio losing its autonomy, but also because Visio, not too long ago, introduced a pseudo-Open Source program for IntelliCAD.
I should say that the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium will either be quietly killed or merely allowed to wither, with no infusions of new work.
--
--
There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
Most of the reviews of Star Office I've seen say it's great, but not as "bell and whistly" as MS Office. IMHO, I think that's great, since by the time I'd use any of those really deep features of MS Office, I'd have turned to a superior (and separate) product.
Unfortunately, it looks like now if we want to have Visio, and it's really great abilities, we're going to have to submit to having the whole MS Office mess dragged along with it.
BTW, this sort of thing has happened before, usually with diappointing results. There was (and maybe still is) a product that was called Org Chart Plus, which was a great little product for slapping together quickie org chart type documents. Microsoft bought them too, and now you can't use the Org Chart software unless you bring it up under some standard MS Office app, and have to drill through all that junk to get the part you want.
Given the way Microsoft has trated aquisitions in the past, I'd say overall it doesn't look to good for the future of VISIO.
The catch is that M$'s pracdtices is: buys you out, force you out of business or steal your technology and call it their own. If you don't fit into one of these catagories their not worried about you. I think the best thing that could happen is if a Ted Kazinski out there would just level the M$ complex in redmond. That's the ONLY thing that could do anything about M$! The DOJ won't put a stop to them that's for sure, and what other company out there can compete with M$'s money, power, marketing and FUD machine? The only other thing would be to seceretly Reverse engineer EVERY prodict of M$'s and secretly release the R.E. code on the internet that would HURT M$'s to the core. But alas both options are highly illigal. But wouldn't the second option be on the same lines of M$'s tactics????
The Truth is a Virus!!!
The trail of Microsoft-acquired firms looks to me like the images of the road to Basra at the end of the Gulf War.
How long can Microsoft be permitted to buy out anybody and everybody it pleases? Doesn't its position as 'behemoth' and 'dominant' justify extreme scrutiny in each acquisition it makes? I submit that every time Microsoft purchases another software company, it is further strengthening its monopolistic power by reducing the presence of competitors. I feel that Microsoft's dominant market is no longer OSes or Business Suites or server software*...it's just plain SOFTWARE! Let Justice prevail soon...only I doubt the current DOJ will facilitate this.
*for the sake of argument, let's just say NT is dominant.
Certified Microsoft Notworking Specialist
This sucks. I also liked Visio.
What do people think of the anti-trust implications of this? I know that it would be very hard to make this case, buit if you look at the software productivity applications market as a whole, and not just individual markets, then its pretty clear that Microfot is trying to extend its Monopoly through aquisition which isn't legal. Any thoughts?
Do you think that MS has future plans for, oh I dunno, "Microsoft Photoshop" and "Microsoft 3D Studio Max?"
I don't know how I'll react if MS buys the makers of two of the reasons I still use Windows (besides games)... Cakewalk Pro Audio and Sonic Foundry's SoundForge.
Cakewalk is already the market leader in music production applications which range from entry-level home apps to high-end music studio apps. They are also already "in bed" with MS technology (both soundforge and Cakewalk PA use DirectX plugins, for one thing, which actually work well).
I really like Cakewalk and SF as they are-- powerful, fast, easy to use, and UNBLOATED! The last thing I need is a dancing paperclip causing a GPF which corrupts whatever music files I have open at the time.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
yep, there's dia. We just need a Orbit idl interface to it, and I can integrate it into FreeCASE
Remember this...no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn....(jim morrison)
If we suddenly start supporting it. It's a shame it uses GTK+ though, I'd rather code in C++ than C. I have the Mico C++ bindings down pat, but the Orbit C bindings are a little tough right now--due to lack of time to explore them, prolog and sql are quite a plate to stomach.
Remember this...no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn....(jim morrison)
...well, actually, I like qt/kde c++ bindings better---I know, this is flamebait---moderate as such ;)
Remember this...no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn....(jim morrison)
Well, I am gonna give it another try(gtk--) i have it compiling on my ultra-60 right now.
Remember this...no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn....(jim morrison)
dia (www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/dia.html) is a gnomish replacement for visio. It isn't quite there yet, but it's nice and geting better.
Check it out.
I don't understand why a company just producing closing arguments for an antitrust case against them would go off and munch another company. Then again, they probably will just throw lawyers at this case until everybody forgets about it.
-drstatgeek (close enough, at least
Visio makes a large set of products that allow one to solve problems by viewing them visually.
There is increasing interest in information visualization, the presentation of large sets of data in visual format. Edward R. Tufte of Yale University has written extensively about this.
Microsoft itself has been moving in this area: e.g. Mappoint2000.
Microsoft's acquistion of Visio helps position itself to be able to exploit developments in information visualization.
It will be interesting to see what response the Linux / open source community develops to effect information visualization.
Visio is the only reason why we are keeping some NT machines around in the lab. I was hoping for a port from them soon. Eh. It seems that we will have KVisio or nothing. Lotzi
What about Corel? They are the best positioned to provide a Visio-like application for Linux.
I don't know how well structured is their code for CorelDraw is (it might be a mess, very old application, developed incrementally) BUT it is a clean object oriented code, having the graphic engines all in place, implementing something like this might be easy.
Actually a developer rush of several weeks might do it. And that would really improve their market position too, being able to offer something inexistent on a large platform. Also, the Visio format is not such a strong standard like Word, so the portability problems are easier.
Any comments on this?
Lotzi
Jon Honeyball, in his 'Advanced Windows' column in October's PC Pro (page 251) made a pitch to Visio's Guy Tweedale about hooking into the MMC window to allow visualisation of the Active Directory structure. Give away a free viewer as a default, with paid for versions that allow editing and management of large multidomain environments.
Hi, So I wonder what this means for the OpenDWG project? OpenDWG (http://www.opendwg.org) is a project headed by Visio to open Autodesk's Autocad DWG file format for use as a general standard. The libraries that access the DWG file format are based on reverse engineering the DWG file, which Autodesk is vehemently against. Autodesk and Microsoft are closely tied, so I wonder what Microsoft will do to the OpenDWG project now that Visio is owned by MS. Hmmmmmmm....
Visio may be used extensively worldwide, but seeing it described with words like "incredible" makes me suspect that most Slashdot folk have not used a lot of other graphics software. Yes, Visio has a lot of features, but it is one of the klunkiest graphics programs I have ever seen.
For all the many faults of the Macintosh, it pretty much rules the graphic design space. If any Slashdot reader needs to do some serious graphics work, then spend some serious time using one of the many excellent graphics applications for the Mac. I say 'serious time' because just dabbling won't allow you to get past the mere fact that you are using a different OS. By putting in some real time, you should be able to get past the unfamiliarity factor and see some of the advantages.
I'm sure that Visio has some useful features that are really hard to find elsewhere, and anybody who is comfortable with it may as well keep using it. At the same time, if we spread the word far and wide that a klunky product is actually really good, then we make it that much less likely that Microsoft will ever improve the UI.
Is this anything like Intermapper? Quite a good network diagramming tool, and still available for reasonable cost from Dartmouth Uni, I think.
Fortunately, they can't buy Linux!
The Current line is that Visio will not be integrated into Office. The thinking is that it would not be of any monetary gain to M$
I wonder what Microsoft's plan with this is - if they are trying to compete with StarOffice by offering a cheaper product, or just eliminating the competition... The latter seems more likely, It's pretty hard to compete with something that is free, and they still have no grip (and probably never will) in the Linux world, where StarOffice is most popular.
-palp
I don't really think SCO would be competition for Linux - I can't think of a good reason for a home user to run SCO. I wouldn't be too suprised to see Microsoft incorperate their own version of something like Cygwin into a 32bit command shell, make Explorer into a window manager, and sell it off as Winix or something. Wouldn't be that hard, and the uninformed might buy into it.
-palp
Visio is the single most useful application I know of - there is no comparison. Everything else I do is cross platform and OS-agnostic - but Visio is the reason I keep Windows around. This story is totally relevant - on many different levels. It is also very sad and will probably end my use of future Visio products and ultimately Windows itself.
I know there are a lot more... but I figured I'd kick off the list.