Quote from: Yacine on May 08, 2025, 08:51:11 PMAI is doing our job now.

I think the most likely answer! There's a similar situation on Stack Overflow

... but now seriously – where have the askers gone?

There's definitely no new sheriff in town.
Visio is still the only truly clever tool when it comes to graphics + data + manual editing.
I honestly don't know any other application that combines these three in a meaningful way.

Sure – basic usability stuff, UI questions, and built-in functions can probably be handled by AIs nowadays.
But what about the deeper architectural thinking?
Designing entire solutions, SmartShapes, automation frameworks and domain-specific toolkits?

Maybe the AI is catching those users.
Maybe it's keeping them.

In the end, Visio is still a thinking person's tool – and thinking takes time.
... and maybe the next generation never discovered the beauty of a well-behaved ShapeSheet cell.

The StackoOverflow is taken down by AI bots, IMHO.

Regarding Visio, from what I can see:

- Mural. It's minimalistic and dumb as a bag of hammers, but it has probably dumped so much money in marketing that the younger generation started picking it.

- draw.io is free, and it can read Visio (sometimes may fail with complex professional diagrams, but the basic ones are fine). It has also taken some users who may not be very demanding and just do some basic "home" usage.

- Mermaid. It is now a built-in tool for diagramming that is available in many products out of the box, including the most popular ones like GitHub and Microsoft DevOps. Also, it has direct support drawing from text automatically, i.e., building a diagram using AI (you just describe the diagram you want to show in a normal language)

- Lucid Charts. Took a big part of the market from Visio in the enterprise and similar business areas.

- CADs, if compared to the 90s: many more architectural and industrial projects are done now with specialized CAD engineering tools and not with Visio (especially after Autodesk added a subscription option for example). Microsoft put a lot of effort into ditching this sort of usage.

- Many apps have added their own built-in flowchart editors. Many component library suppliers have added a "diagram editor" as a component for the application developers to their packages (DevExpress, the most popular enterprise app components provider, as an example)

And Microsoft has not managed to launch an app store for Visio in 10 years.

My gut says that the snowball started rolling downhill several years ago and M$ couldn't be bothered.  They had an end game insight, and supporting Visio was an irritating thorn.  From the Forum alone, look at ignored bugs, ignored new features. The previous chart shows the decay.  For the Forum, it seems perhaps a more rounded peak with a wider consistency.  But, yeah, Vivid did seem to interject a hiccup.

I don't know about non-American educational systems, but ours makes sure "nobody is left behind".  This is primarily accomplished by reducing the standards to attain success graduation.  The bulk of new graduates are not big thinkers.  So, AI to the rescue.  AI can't do Visio???  Well, go with what it can do.  Why not?  I think each of us has turned to AI to help our efforts along.  The answer may not work, but failure can lay the foundation to solution that does.

The two surprising aspects are: 1) how quickly it happened, and 2) how equally quickly the flood of spam bots dropped off.  That just might be the most telling indicator.

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Plot of Forum statistics.  Not sure how spam/bots figure into each category.

2011 is curious year.  I think that's when reality of V2010 may have set in.  Yuk!
2014 is also curious.  Not sure why.  Perhaps issues with V2013???  Seems there were a few.

Appears the Forum did indeed have a steep peak. 
If V2010 didn't happen, hard to say how those curves might be.  If you also ignore V2013, and post-Covid / V2019, there is an undeniable drop.  It also seems clear, that major Visio introductions with new features / fixes also had obvious positive impact.  Maybe we're in the inevitable decline exacerbated by the intrusion of AI?
NOTE:
Right axis is new Topics.
Left axis is new Posts and New Members.

Fine, let's accept the evil M$ narrative – they've lost interest, they don't care, they let Visio rot.
But Wapperdude's chart doesn't show Microsoft's performance.
It shows ours.

Isn't this also about how we run the forum?

Search engine visibility, how easy it is to register, what's accessible without logging in – e.g., downloads are hidden, images in old posts aren't immediately visible.
We offer answers, sure. But do we offer learning?

No tutorials.
No curated content.
No structured onboarding for newcomers.
And definitely no "Visio Bootcamp for SmartShape Creation" – although I'd sign up for that in a heartbeat.

Maybe it's not only Visio that needs attention.
Maybe we do too.

P.S.: just remember the request from 2 days ago. The user asked for real world examples of drawings. We can provide that and more, whole workflows and solutions!

@Yacine:  Interesting. I don't disagree with your observations.   However, it needs VisioGuy's participation to address the various points as to their merit, resolution.  Such a discussion is difficult as we're scattered all over the globe with large time differences.

@Yacine, there is a difference between "them" and "us" here. We are not paid, and building all the great things you mentioned would take a lot of time. They are paid, however it's their full-time job.

Quote from: Nikolay on June 15, 2025, 06:42:31 PM@Yacine, there is a difference between "them" and "us" here. We are not paid, and building all the great things you mentioned would take a lot of time. They are paid, however it's their full-time job.

I agree, but I would formulate it a little bit differently.

Since, we are volunteers, how much are we ready to invest? We are already doing a great job.

On the other hand, this forum does not belong to "them", but to us enthusiasts. 

Quote from: Yacine on June 14, 2025, 10:28:25 PMBut Wapperdude's chart doesn't show Microsoft's performance.

They had forums technet.microsoft.com (closed in 2021) and answers.microsoft.com. Then added techcommunity.microsoft.com/
But there they discuss superficial issues. There are almost no live experts there. Most of them are activists of our forum, and some Visio MVPs (David J. Parker, John Goldsmith). Lately there are a lot of responses from MS bots.
Latest MS activity to popularize Visio, a series of videos on the Vimeo platform
https://conferences.presentergroup.com/visioandpowerplatformwebinars

Quote from: Yacine on June 15, 2025, 09:45:29 PMSince, we are volunteers, how much are we ready to invest?

In my work life I have not used Visio since last October (absolutely). For the last 2-3 years, of all the documents I've worked with, 15% have been in Visio. 20 years ago 95% of my documents were done in Visio.

For now I can still answer questions on this forum and on the Russian language forum from old memory, but how long can I continue?
I love being part of the community, but I have to learn other tools for my main job. Unfortunately I have less and less time for extracurricular volunteering!

Quote from: Nikolay on June 16, 2025, 12:27:06 PMI mean, this tool looks powerful. Imagine you have a sidebar and can tell Visio to do stuff.
...
What do you think?

For those who buy Visio Super Utilities there will be nothing to look for on the forum:)

I haven't seen an AI, that can build whole solutions. If we train one with content of this forum, it would perform better, but still not as good as us.

AI generated projection of Visio trend:

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AI performance estimate Visio vs Lucid Chart.  Visio values are estimated as M$ doesn't uniquely break those out.
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During the course of my discussion with Copilot AI, I posed the question what must happen to re-launch Visio. We agreed that a total make-over was necessary.  Various roadmaps, timelines, capabilities were examined.  Then, what a mock effort would entail.  Here is the opening pitch crafted by Copilot:

🎤 Keynote Pitch (Opening 90 Seconds)
> Imagine this... You're staring at a blank canvas, pressured to visualize a new process, and your team is scattered across four cities and three time zones. What if you could just describe what you need — and your diagram builds itself? What if your collaborators could join in, live, edit together, and trigger workflows right from the canvas?

> This isn't the future of diagramming — this is Visio Flow.

> A fully reimagined platform powered by AI, designed for collaboration, and built on the backbone of Microsoft 365. It's where shapes think with you, and diagrams don't just explain... they act.

> With Visio Flow, diagrams become decisions.