Visio Corporation was a software company based in

Seattle, Washington Seattle ( ) is the List of municipalities in Washington, most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington (state), Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the List of Unit ...

, USA. Its principal product was a diagramming

application software Application software is any computer program that is intended for end-user use not operating, administering or programming the computer. An application (app, application program, software application) is any program that can be categorized as ...

of the same name. It was acquired by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

and is now in a division of that company, which continues to develop the application under the name

Microsoft Visio Microsoft Visio (, ), formerly Microsoft Office Visio, is a diagramming and vector graphics application and is part of the Microsoft 365 Business. The product was first introduced in 1992 by former American software company Visio Corporation, an ...

History

Axon Corporation was incorporated May 1, 1989, shortly after Jeremy Jaech left Aldus. 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. All of its founders came from

Aldus Corporation Aldus Corporation was an American software company best known for its pioneering desktop publishing software. PageMaker, the company's most well-known product, ushered in the modern era of desktop computers such as the Macintosh seeing widesp ...

: Jeremy Jaech and Dave Walter were two of Aldus's original founders, and Ted Johnson was the lead developer of Aldus

PageMaker Aldus PageMaker (later Adobe PageMaker) is a desktop publishing computer program introduced in 1985 by the Aldus Corporation on the Apple Macintosh. The combination of the Macintosh's graphical user interface, PageMaker publishing software, and t ...

for

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

. 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 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

. In November 1995, Shapeware changed its own name to Visio and on November 9, 1995, marked its

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investm ...

of stock under the ticker VSIO. On January 7, 2000,

Microsoft Corporation Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

acquired Visio in a

stock swap In corporate finance, a stock swap is the exchange of one equity-based asset for another, where, during the merger or acquisition, the swap provides an opportunity to pay with stock rather than with cash; see . Overview The acquiring company ...

. 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.
-

References

External links

Microsoft Visio history
Defunct software companies of the United States Defunct companies based in Seattle Software companies established in 1989 Software companies disestablished in 2000 2000 mergers and acquisitions 1989 establishments in Washington (state) 2000 disestablishments in Washington (state) 1995 initial public offerings Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq {{US-software-company-stub