Founder Charles Ferguson | Founded 1994 | |
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.
Vermeer was funded by Matrix Partners, Sigma Partners, and Atlas Venture.
The company was purchased by Microsoft for US$133 million in January 1996 ($203 million in present-day terms) in order to acquire FrontPage as a new weapon in the browser wars.
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.