Visio
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Visio was a software company in Seattle, Washington. 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
The company was founded in September of 1990 as the Axon Corporation. 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.
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.
When Shapeware released Visio 4.0 on August 18, 1995, it was one of the first applications developed specifically for Windows 95.
In November 1995, Shapeware changed its own name to Visio and marked its initial public offering of stock under the ticker VSIO.
On January 7, 2000, Microsoft acquired Visio for US$1,500,000,000, which was its largest acquisition to date.
References
- Microsoft Visio History (http://www.mvps.org/visio/History.htm)