Symantec WinFax PRO

» see symantec.com/winfax as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

winfax pro was the kind of software a small-office secretary opened twice a day. i was not a small-office secretary. by the time i had a real pc and a 33.6k modem at home in turkey around 1998, the home fax workflow was already vestigial. fax in turkey lived in the lawyer's office, the noter, the hospital admin desk, places where you handed over a paper original and watched it scan.

tony davis wrote winfax at delrina in toronto in 1990. by 1994 nearly a hundred pc makers were bundling it on new machines: ibm, compaq, hp. january 1995 had it sitting on two-thirds of the windows fax-software market with over ten million copies out the door. that share was the whole product category for a few years. symantec bought delrina in 1995 and rolled winfax into the norton-adjacent utility shelf.

after the acquisition the cadence got slower. winfax pro 10.0 shipped in february 2000 and was the last major release. by late 2001 symantec had let the dev and support staff go. third-party call centers handled customer questions from 2002 onward, which is how you can tell a product is being kept alive only for the install base.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

winfax replaced the standalone fax machine with a modem dialer and a printer driver. you printed any document to "winfax" and it sent the page over your phone line. incoming faxes arrived as tiff files you read on screen. for a small business on a single phone line in 1993, that workflow was a real upgrade over a thermal-roll fax box in the corner.

delrina was a canadian shareware-era publisher that also made perform, formflow, communicate. winfax was the cash cow. by mid-decade it was eighty percent of the company's revenue. symantec did not buy delrina for the form software.

~ how it actually ended ~

email killed the home fax. internet fax services like efax killed the office fax modem. broadband meant the second phone line that hosted the fax modem got dropped from the bill. winfax never had a category to defend itself in by 2003.

symantec posted an end-of-availability notice in june 2006. no port to windows vista, no follow-up product, no migration path. the install base kept running pro 10.0 on whatever windows xp box was wired to a phone jack until the phone jack itself went away.

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