Micrografx

» see micrografx.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

by the time i had a reason to draw a flowchart, the answer was visio and there was no second answer. micrografx is the company that had owned that question for most of the previous decade, and i learned the name the way you learn the name of something that already lost, from a file extension or an about box on a machine somebody else had set up.

paul and george grayson started it in richardson, texas in 1982, when the pc graphics market was dos and the standard approach was to write your own driver for every card. what the graysons did instead is the interesting part: in 1986 they shipped a vector drawing package called in*a*vision built for windows 1.0, a product almost nobody was buying, on a platform almost nobody was developing for.

the bet was correct and about five years early. in*a*vision became micrografx designer and stayed a serious professional drawing tool through the whole windows 2.x and 3.x run. around it the company assembled picture publisher for photo editing and windows draw for the consumer end. then in 1992 it bought roykore and with it abc flowcharter, which is the product micrografx would end up being remembered for and killed by.

~ the case file ~

~ the first windows app ~

being early to windows was worth something real for about a decade. a corporate buyer standardizing on windows in 1990 had a short list of graphics vendors who had actually shipped for it, and micrografx was on that list ahead of nearly everyone. designer competed directly with coreldraw and adobe illustrator and held its own, which is a sentence that would have sounded implausible to anybody who saw in*a*vision demoed in 1986.

~ the visio problem ~

abc flowcharter was the profitable half. business diagramming is unglamorous and enormously sticky, because once a company's process documentation lives in one file format it does not move. micrografx had that market and a competitor named visio had the rest of it, and the two of them fought over it through the mid-nineties on roughly even terms.

in september 1999 microsoft bought visio, and the fight ended without another shot. visio was folded into the office family and sold through the same channel that already had every corporate license agreement in existence, which meant flowcharting stopped being a purchase decision and became a checkbox on a renewal. micrografx never found a response, because there is no response to that.

~ what it became ~

corel announced the acquisition on 16 july 2001, an all-stock deal valued at thirty-two million dollars, with a clause topping it up in cash if corel's own share price fell under two dollars ninety. thirty-two million was roughly one year of micrografx revenue, which tells you what the market thought the future was worth. the register described both parties at the time as windows survivors from the dos era, which was accurate and not a compliment.

designer became corel designer and is still sold under that name today. the business-process side was spun back out in 2003 as a separate company called igrafx, and abc flowcharter went with it as igrafx flowcharter. so the products both outlived the company, under two different owners, with the micrografx name attached to neither.

~ the long tail ~

what is left is file formats and clipart. the.drw files, and the libraries that were bundled onto so many oem machines in the nineties that they still surface in old archives. underneath that sits a generation of corporate process diagrams authored in abc flowcharter and migrated into visio badly. micrografx.com does not go anywhere now. corel designer's file dialog still opens the old formats, which is the most any of these companies get.

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