The luck of the draw
How much do you know about business drawing software? I'm a bit of a newbie at this myself, so for the benefit of all of us, I've found out 10 interesting things about the drawing tools market, courtesy of Jeremy Jaech, the chief executive of Visio, and the little background knowledge I have.
(As this knowledge was gained by visiting a struggling artist who claimed to have discovered a new form of art using PC paint programmes, my education is far from complete, especially as half-way through the interview, the artist stubbed out his joint, shouted: 'We've got to save the bloody, bloody trees', and burst into floods of tears, leaving me to find my own way out.)
1) Visio has 2.5 million users for its drawing packages, which are basically like a set of useful stencils, thus getting over the fact that none of them can draw to save their lives, especially with a mouse. After Visio, according to Romtec, comes Corel and Micrografx, then AutoCAD (if you don't think drawing should be fun).
2) Half of those 2.5 million users weren't drawing at all before and the other half drew everything by hand (bad idea).
3) Of the rest of them, the majority were attempting to do drawings by using those ridiculous pictures of grinning cartoon men with big noses and people shaking hands that you get with PowerPoint (very bad idea).
4) Among people who use drawing packages, Visio claims three out of five say it's the most important product they use.
5) I have a problem with that last statistic. If I bought something that wasn't already in Microsoft Office or Windows, which - at the risk of prejudicing the outcome of Microsoft's anti-trust trial - isn't much, then I'd think it was big news in my cubicle.
6) What really bothers me is that the other two out of five are probably extremely excited by PowerPoint, because of the cool pictures of cartoon men, etc.
7) The market is dominated by volume licensing for the special needs of large customers. Visio sells lots to the Ministry of Defence, I assume because PowerPoint doesn't have any good clipart of people being blown to smithereens, and to Boeing, probably because plane crashes are notoriously hard to draw.
8) So far, Microsoft hasn't made any attempt to introduce its own business drawing package. Visio is being nice to it because: 'We have to be obsequious to Microsoft, so if it wants a drawing package, it buys us.' I hope I haven't let the cat out of the bag there.
9) The next step: to link the engineering and technical drawing packages to back-end functions
so that, for example, when you draw a database schematic differently, it actually changes the way the database is set up. This is being introduced at the end of this year. It's this engineering and technical stuff that's the biggest growth market.
10) Jaech claims the chief executive of Corel has a large, nude picture of his wife (that's the Corel bloke's wife, not Jaech's) above his desk.
Tim Phillips is a freelance IT journalist.