Vermeer Technologies Incorporated was a software company founded in 1994 by Charles H. Ferguson and Randy Forgaard. Its products were a Web site development tool, called FrontPage, and a Web server to complement developing in FrontPage, called Personal Web Server. They launched the initial version of FrontPage on October 2, 1995.[citation needed]
Vermeer was funded by Matrix Partners, Sigma Partners, and Atlas Venture.[citation needed]
The company was purchased by Microsoft for US$133 million in January 1996 ($217 million in present-day terms[1]) in order to acquire FrontPage as a new weapon in the browser wars.[citation needed]
The company's birth, development and sale was the subject of Ferguson's 1999 book, High St@kes, No Prisoners.
The start of the company was described in a Harvard Business School case, "Vermeer Technologies (A): A Company is Born" (HBS 9-397-078).
Even after Microsoft acquired FrontPage, the software continued to store proprietary configuration settings in directories whose names started with _vti. The letters VTI stand for Vermeer Technologies Inc.
References
- ^ Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Consumer Price Index (estimate) 1800–". Retrieved January 1, 2020.
- Microsoft Press release announcing Vermeer acquisition
- History of Frontpage by SEO Consultants
- W3C paper on Distributed Web authoring (including timeline)