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Ask HN: What happened to Visual Thought?

2 points by cqlchess ↗ HN
I was looking around for a good graph drawing program recently and I realized that there still doesn't seem to be anything as slick, easy-to-use, and cross-platform as Confluent's old Visual Thought from the early 2000s.

I understand the company went under, but how could that happen? Visual Thought had a lot of fans even back then. Surely they could have just supported it profitably as a crisp, well-designed, cross-platform diagramming tool that emphasized ease-of-use and graph-drawing.

5 comments

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orionblastar
Who knows what the old corp did? Someone needs to buy the IP and make a modern version of it as a startup.
cqlchess
Think how many startups lose huge amounts of money for years and years. I just don't understand how a company could close when they had a reliable, well-done, popular, software product. I seem to recall they charged some reasonable amount for it - it wasn't free - which must have covered expenses and then some.

I just don't get it.

orionblastar
Remember Quark Express? Basically same thing.

I really liked Quarterdeck as well until Symantec bought them out and got rid of most of their products.

orionblastar
OK, I just figured it out. You are a niche company that makes a good product and you get good sales, the problem is you don't get enough sales to make enough profit to keep the shareholders happy.

Then the OSes you support get changed so much that you have to develop the new versions on them, but the programming language you use got changed to support that new operating system, etc. So you have to pay for training your developers or hire new developers to work with this new technology.

IBM had this problem with the Lotus series and Windows 9X. The Windows API had been changed so much that it broke Lotus Smart Suite and the cost of rewriting it to work with modern Windows like Windows 2000/XP had cost so much that IBM had to fork OpenOffice.Org into Lotus Symphony which was easier than rewriting Smart Suite and cost a lot less money. But it failed. Also, that darn DOCX format broke the Lotus products trying to be compatible with the old and new office file formats.

So this is a problem that the so called Unicorns that do just one thing great have to face.

I wonder why more isn't written about it? You can learn more from a failure than a success.

cqlchess
I wish I could find out specifically what went wrong with Visual Thought.

Visual Thought was not an OS or some immensely complex distributed workflow product. It was a simple diagram editor. It just did its job very well (probably because it didn't try to be too much). It just couldn't have cost all that much to keep it up to date with the different OS's.

Not sure how many people have used it, but it was head and shoulders above anything else on Unix at the time; and I still can't find anything on Mac in 2017 as good (it was much better than Visio at what it did as well).

And it was popular. They must have had decent revenue.