cqlchess

I wish I could find out specifically what went wrong with Visual Thought.

Visual Thought was not an OS or some immensely complex distributed workflow product. It was a simple diagram editor. It just did its job very well (probably because it didn't try to be too much). It just couldn't have cost all that much to keep it up to date with the different OS's.

Not sure how many people have used it, but it was head and shoulders above anything else on Unix at the time; and I still can't find anything on Mac in 2017 as good (it was much better than Visio at what it did as well).

And it was popular. They must have had decent revenue.

Think how many startups lose huge amounts of money for years and years. I just don't understand how a company could close when they had a reliable, well-done, popular, software product. I seem to recall they charged some reasonable amount for it - it wasn't free - which must have covered expenses and then some.

I just don't get it.

Chiang's "Understand" and "Story of Your Life" are two of the best stories ever written in my view. They evince a mastery of prose craftsmanship that's incredibly rare, combined with fascinating but logical plot ideas.

Being a Chiang fan is frustrating though because he writes so little!

I hate the way Gutenberg, and thus your site, mangles quotation marks and apostrophes.