I've had the chance to sit down and interview Tom Mereckis, Group Product Manager of the Visio 2002 at Microsoft. In this interview we discuss the development of Visio 2002, his thoughts on product activation, product changes, and much more (not to mention a pretty funny story after Visio 2002 went gold) Here is an excerpt:

ActiveWin.com: Why were the previous four versions combined into two?

Tom Mereckis: We heard a chorus of cries from customers, partners, and our own colleagues at Microsoft saying "Your offerings are too complicated! Which Visio do I need?" Our four Visio 2000 offerings were hard to make sense of, so we consolidated Visio 2000 Professional and Visio 2000 Technical into Visio 2002 Professional. We took the advanced IT diagramming tools in Visio 2000 Enterprise and created an add-on to Visio 2002 Professional called Visio Enterprise Network Tools. We took the software and database modeling tools in Visio 2000 Enterprise and put them into the forthcoming Visual Studio.NET Enterprise Architect Edition. We felt that since most of the developers interested in modeling their applications have Visual Studio, then that's where those tools should reside.

ActiveWin.com: Did the development team work frequently with different departments at Microsoft in designing/developing this product? How so?

Tom Mereckis: We worked actively with a wide variety of groups at Microsoft, all of which was a learning experience since the vast majority of the folks working on Visio 2002 were from Visio Corporation, and were therefore new to the Microsoft way of doing things. We worked with other development teams and development support teams to get access to tools, processes, and other resources that really helped us make Visio 2002 our best-ever release. The testing of this product was just amazing. The resources Microsoft has to test its products far surpass those we had available to us as Visio Corporation.