The Open Design Alliance was born of contention and it has grown through accommodation. President Arnold van Weide hopes the organization will go on to thrive through innovation. The ODA was founded originally as the OpenDWG by companies and individuals who depended on CAD data, especially DWG data in some form. DWG, of course, is the native format for AutoCAD. The founding members included representatives from DataCAD, Eagle Point Software, Parametric Technology Corp., Rasterex, ViaGrafix, and Visio all Autodesk competitors. Visio was one of the key drivers behind the movement. Visio had ambitions to be simple drafting tool like Microsoft Word is a simple word processing tool—it was a more innocent time.