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 ($212 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
