Visio Corporation was a software company based in Seattle, Washington, USA. Its principal product was a diagramming application software of the same name. It was acquired by Microsoft and is now in a division of that company, which continues to develop the application under the name Microsoft Visio.
History
Axon Corporation was incorporated May 1, 1989, shortly after Jeremy Jaech left Aldus.[1] Later, in summer 1990, Jeremy Jaech and Ted Johnson met to come up with the initial product definition and then in the fall of 1990 recruited Dave Walter as their third founder.[2] All of its founders came from Aldus Corporation: Jeremy Jaech and Dave Walter were two of Aldus's original founders, and Ted Johnson was the lead developer of Aldus PageMaker for Windows.[1]
In 1992, before it had released a single product, the company changed its name to Shapeware. It finally released its first application, Visio, in November of that year.[1]
When Shapeware released Visio 4.0 on August 18, 1995, it was one of the first applications developed specifically for Windows 95.[1]
In November 1995, Shapeware changed its own name to Visio and on November 9, 1995, marked its initial public offering of stock under the ticker VSIO.[3]
On January 7, 2000, Microsoft Corporation acquired Visio in a stock swap. Microsoft gave Visio shareholders 0.45 Microsoft shares for each Visio share. Based on the value of Microsoft stock when the deal closed, the trade was worth approximately US$1.5 billion. This was Microsoft's largest acquisition until they acquired aQuantive.[4]
External links
References
- Visio Corp Timeline retrieved October 2, 2014^
- The Early Days of Visio Corporation March 27, 2014, retrieved October 2, 2014^
- Visio Corp Trivia retrieved October 2, 2014^
- - Microsoft buying Visio for $1.3 billion The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 15, 1999, retrieved August 20, 2006 $1.5 billion Visio purchase complete, Microsoft says The Seattle Times, January 8, 2000, retrieved August 20, 2006^