— Charles Ferguson, a cofounder of Vermeer Technologies, the company that created FrontPage, discussing the challenges of building and hosting webpages using standard HTML in his book, High Stakes, No Prisoners. Ferguson's company was among the first to tackle the issue of visual HTML design and management, and its product, FrontPage, was designed to tackle the issue by combining simple HTML design and, if needed, complex functionality."This was absurd. The whole point of the Internet, and the Web, was that it should be easy to get to anything, anywhere. It should be possible to develop services on your PC and then send them across the Internet to wherever they would reside. But you couldn't do that without a fairly complex piece of technology—one that did not yet exist."
FrontPage was created to jump on the information superhighway and build the roads
Our lives would have been far simpler if we could have written just a shrink-wrapped PC application like Word. The problem was that, no matter what Andy and Randy tried, Web technology dictated that many of the functions we wanted to provide, like text-search engines, had to run alongside the Web server. In part, this is just the way servers work. In part, it was the result of our extremely ambitious goals. In part, it reflected the fact that Berners-Lee had not designed the Web architecture with mere mortals or PC applications in mind.
The real problem with FrontPage: Its cluttered code created lock-in for Microsoft
"While we believe code is the best tool for many things, some things are better done with visual design. It's easier to position and reposition an element on screen by dragging-and-dropping it, then typing in x and y coordinates."
When writing stories like these, it's always interesting to see what people are up to after they move on from their initial gravy train.For example, webTV mastermind Steve Perlman, whose own company was bought out by Microsoft, is trying to reinvent cellular technology. And late tech entrepreneur Dave Goldberg, who spent time at SurveyMonkey and Yahoo, got his feet wet in the tech world by selling CD-ROM magazines.Charles Ferguson's postscript is more interesting than most. He's not doing anything related to technology these days, but his at-times acerbic voice—first highlighted by the book he wrote about selling FrontPage to Microsoft—may be more prominent than ever. See, Ferguson directed one of the most essential documentaries of the last decade, a methodical dive into the 2008 financial crisis called Inside Job, which won an Oscar in 2011. That Oscar win was punctuated with that hard-to-ignore voice."Three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that's wrong," he said in his famed Academy Awards speech.Maybe we didn't get very good code out of FrontPage. We certainly did get an interesting filmmaker out of the deal.