
Ask HN: What happened to Visual Thought? - cqlchess
I was looking around for a good graph drawing program recently and I realized that there still doesn&#x27;t seem to be anything as slick, easy-to-use, and cross-platform as Confluent&#x27;s old Visual Thought from the early 2000s.<p>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.
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

