Maybe Not!
To bring this sermon on design back to reality, here's a very fast history of what has been happening most recently in analysis and design software.
After years of chaos and argument, starting about ten years ago, one design methodology called UML, or Unified Modeling Language, finally started to be accepted by nearly everyone. An international standard for UML was written and even Microsoft supported it. In 1999, Microsoft bought a software company, Visio, which added Visio's excellent graphics software for creating UML diagrams to their product line.
Then corporate profits started to mess things up again.
The company founded by the original inventors of UML, Rational Software, still had the biggest part of the design and analysis software market. Very early in 2003, IBM bought Rational and suddenly IBM owned the commanding lead in the UML software market. Just as suddenly, Microsoft stopped talking about UML in their sales presentations. I used to amuse myself by asking questions from the audience about whether Microsoft would continue to support UML during their sales presentations. Great fun!
