A Little Bit of History: The Original Visio Business Plan

One of our developers pointed me towards this great case study of a business drawing program called Mainline, which eventually was renamed to Visio. Other early names of the company and product include Axon, ShapeWare, and Graw (see https://visio.mvps.org/History.htm for more interesting bits of Visio history). As you might imagine, diagrams were a pretty key part of the pitch in the business plan:

I liked this disclaimer from the cover as well:

This document makes reference to Microsoft Windows 3.1, an unannounced product of Microsoft Corporation. Nothing contained in this document should be construed as an announcement of said product.

It is probably ok to talk about Windows 3.1 now.

This is all from way before my time. I started working at Visio well after the Microsoft acquisition.