Brent Simmons: “I can’t remember when it first dawned on me that app development is a form of show business.” – When I read this I immediately thought of Ted Johnson. Ted was a co-founder and CTO of Visio. He likened software development to movie production, thus the nifty little easter egg in Visio 2.0. The only one we ever really had.
Meet the Visio 2.0 team
To see this lovely “ego” screen you’d hold down both mouse buttons as the Visio 2.0 splash screen was showing. And, yes, I still believe Visio was the best company I’ve ever worked for.
then why leave?
Tru dat. Best one so far. And you leave when you gotta leave… The best company ever remains so because we leave — and realize that what we had there was far and away better than so many others… It was a perfect combination of vision, opportunity, talent, diversity, energy and positive attitude. I’d join again in a milli-heartbeat!
Well… Visio, the company I loved so much, was sold to Microsoft and it didn’t stay that wonderful company I loved so much. Now, I did leave once, and I came back.
When Microsoft acquired Visio things changed after a few years, which is fine, it belonged to Microsoft after all. I was a telecommuter, I had a great boss that arranged for me to spend one week a month in Seattle. The new management decided no telecommuters. There were four of us and we were all offered jobs in Redmond, we all declined, and moved on.
By that time the Visio we knew was just a memory. As David said “It was a perfect combination of vision, opportunity, talent, diversity, energy and positive attitude.” – Yes, it was that good.
Hats off to Jeremy, Ted, and Dave. You guys did good, and I’m honored to have been a part of it.