Vermeer Technologies

Vermeer Technologies, Inc.

Company type	Subsidiary
Founded	1994
Headquarters	Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Key people	Charles H. Ferguson
Products	Truck, Agriculture, Web site, Browser wars
Parent	Microsoft Corporation

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, FrontPage, and a Web server, Personal Web Server, which complemented developing in FrontPage. Vermeer 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 ($258 million in present-day terms^[1]). Microsoft acquired FrontPage as a new weapon in the browser wars.^{[citation needed]}

The company's birth, development, and sale were the subject of Ferguson's 1999 book, High St@kes, No Prisoners.

A Harvard Business School case, "Vermeer Technologies (A): A Company is Born" (HBS 9-397-078), described the start of the company.

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

1. 1634–1699: McCusker, J. J. (1997). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States: Addenda et Corrigenda (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1700–1799: McCusker, J. J. (1992). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1800–present: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Consumer Price Index (estimate) 1800–". Retrieved February 29, 2024.

• Microsoft Press release announcing Vermeer acquisition
• W3C paper on Distributed Web authoring (including timeline)