Microsoft Vizact

~ the last words ~

vizact never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was an office 2000 era product that microsoft sold as a standalone $150 box in north american enterprise channels. the turkish copy of office that everyone i knew had pirated in 2000 was the small business edition off a single cd that did not include the vizact slot. the web-design crowd in turkey at the time built corporate homepages in macromedia flash 4 with a sprinkle of dreamweaver around it, the donanimhaber forum signature i had cycled through that year was a 5kb animated gif rather than an html+time effect. an interactivity tool from microsoft was somebody else's problem.

what vizact actually was. microsoft's bet on a non-developer interactivity tool for the office 2000 file family, announced may 26 1999 at a press event and shipped in september 1999. you opened it, you imported a word document or a powerpoint deck. you picked from a gallery of about thirty visual effects like a page fading in or text sliding across on a timer. the engine underneath was html+time, the w3c working draft that microsoft was pushing as an alternative to flash. the output was a webpage that rendered correctly on an internet explorer 5 install on windows.

nobody bought it. version 9.0 shipped april 1 2000 as the final release, microsoft retired development on the same day. the office xp release a year later did not include a vizact slot in the family. a few support kb articles lingered in the microsoft.com archive into the mid-2000s. the html+time effort itself died slower, microsoft kept the markup alive inside ie until edge replaced trident in 2015, then the dialect went away entirely with the old rendering engine.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

the demo at the 1999 launch was a corporate quarterly report turning into an interactive web presentation in twenty clicks. you pulled in the word file with the actual text. you picked an effect from the gallery. the resulting page had the bar chart sliding into view on a timer. for the office buyer the appeal was an "i don't need a web designer for the intranet" story. for microsoft the appeal was a wedge against flash before flash took the whole animated-web category.

to be honest, the bet was reasonable on paper. html+time was a real standards-track effort and microsoft was the company most able to push it through ie. the office sales channel reached every enterprise that had a quarterly report to build. the price was a small fraction of what hiring an actual web designer cost. if html+time had landed as a cross-browser standard, vizact would have had a runway.

~ the fall ~

the cracks came fast. flash was already at version 4 by mid-1999 with a vector graphics editor that designers actually wanted to use. the html+time output from vizact rendered correctly only on internet explorer 5 for windows. the netscape side ignored the markup entirely. the price was $150 standalone instead of a checkbox inside office, so it had to clear an extra purchase decision in a budget that already covered office. corporate it groups looked at it once and went back to building intranet pages in frontpage.

the windows 2000 sp2 release later in 2000 then yanked the microsoft java virtual machine off the default desktop in response to the sun lawsuit, which broke a chunk of the vizact pipeline on the newest os entirely. for whatever reason the team did not push a follow-up build. the standalone product was already discontinued by then and the office xp slot had been quietly removed from the roadmap.

~ the day it died ~

microsoft did not put out a press release the day vizact died. the version 9.0 update on april 1 2000 was also the last commit on the product. support stayed alive on paper but the team was reassigned. by the time office xp shipped in may 2001, vizact was a footnote in the office family-of-products grid that nobody had clicked on in over a year.

liquid motion had been the 1998 attempt at the same web-animation slot, vizact was the 1999 attempt, both ran out at the same speed. microsoft eventually got the right product into the office line as powerpoint output to html and later as sway, neither of which competed with flash. flash itself outlasted both by a decade and then died on its own in 2020 when chrome and the other browsers pulled the runtime. the html+time wedge from the vizact era never reached a second wind.

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