http://www.microsoft.com/MSOffice/FrontPage/transcript.htm (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)
Conference Participants
PETE HIGGINS: Thank you, and welcome to everybody. We do
appreciate you taking the time this morning or this afternoon
to join us. We will do a brief recap of the announcement and explain
the logic behind it, and then open it up to a question and answer
session.
Briefly, our goal of the call today is to announce that Microsoft
has acquired Vermeer Technologies, and in particular Vermeer's
key product FrontPage, which is an innovative Web authoring tool.
In fact, the leading one on the market today. Further, FrontPage
is an open client server publishing tool designed to make it very
easy for people to create Webs on the Internet or the intranet.
The goal with FrontPage is to make this capability available to
the widest range of users.
FrontPage is an open product in the sense it supports UNIX servers,
Windows NT servers, and of course supports web servers from Netscape,
O'Reilly, and a number of others. Our plan is to continue that
openness. We think it's a tremendous strength of the product.
Perhaps most importantly, the Vermeer team will move to Microsoft
and be the basis for a new Web Authoring Product Unit. And I should
also say welcome to the people at Vermeer who I understand are
listening to this call this morning.
Microsoft is very serious about the Internet. We think it will
change the way individuals and corporations communicate and share
information. FrontPage will be a key part of Microsoft's strategy
for both the intranet or Internet, because it will make that ability
to share information available to the mass market. In the same
way that desktop applications are very, very widely used, we expect
FrontPage to be used by the same audience. The same users of Microsoft
Office will be the users of FrontPage and we think there is tremendous
synergy. Creating a web will be and should be as natural as printing
a document is today from Microsoft Word. We fully intend to make
Web publishing a mass market phenomenon, and our goal is to make
Office and FrontPage the leading technologies for creating intranets.
JOHN MANDILE: I would like to say why Vermeer is so excited
about this whole transaction. I wanted to start with the Vermeer
vision. Since the inception our vision has been to make "Webtop"
publishing accessible to the broadest set of users. When we were
initially approached by Microsoft, we found first that the target
audience for FrontPage was very similar to the audience of Microsoft
Office, and further, that Microsoft had a similar vision to ours
as to how the Web was going to play out in the future.
We've also found there were great synergies between our products
and our customers. The employees were all very excited about this
transaction, and we also felt that this was also going to be a
very important development for the Internet as a whole. We felt
Microsoft had the knowledge and skills to build the distribution
channel and business model to really accelerate our growth and
that's why we moved forward with this merger rapidly. Now, I'm
going to have Randy give a bit more detail on the development
team and the product.
RANDY FORGAARD: Good morning. Just a little bit of background
on Vermeer itself. The company is about a year-and-a-half old,
and at that beginning [co-founder] Charles Ferguson and I had
this idea that what you wanted to do is make it possible for the
average PC user to create Webs. And by "Webs" we really
meant treating a whole Web as a document in and of itself, not
just as a bunch of pages linked together. Things that we noted
that were hard to do in Web technology were creating and managing
and administering those Webs. And to have an interesting Web site
you really want to have interactivity. You want to have discussion
groups, surveys, so forth. And there really needed to be a way
for normal people to be able to create those Webs without having
to go and find a programmer to help them do that programming that
you normally need.
And so that's when really the whole team at Vermeer got together
and built FrontPage. FrontPage is a client server Web-authoring
product that really behaves like a normal application. It's intended
for people who are familiar with spreadsheets, word processors
and so forth. And those people can now publish their own Webs
within their organizations, the intranet opportunity, and also
publish those Webs externally and have those Webs be full and
have interactivity. And that's through various technologies in
FrontPage such as BOTs. The main theme is not just simple HTML
editing. This is really treating Webs as a document in and of
themselves. And when we first started talking to Microsoft just
a couple of months ago, we were really impressed by many things.
And among them were, first of all, the people. Chris Peters and
his team are just terrific. And we were amazed and very happy
that they seemed to really get the fact that this Web authoring
phenomenon is really for the large number of average PC users.
It's not just for the ivory tower types.
And the other thing that's impressive as we got to thinking about
it, Microsoft as a whole just brings so much to what our efforts
at Vermeer have been able to accomplish. Microsoft has very strong
database capabilities, the BackOffice solution, and obviously
the Web is moving more and more toward databases and that's a
capability we really need to get into FrontPage. Another capability
is the scripting languages that are out there with JavaScript
and Microsoft's own VBScript and Java itself. And these are things
that need to be reflected inside of any world class Web authoring
product. And those are technologies that we don't have the expertise
on in-house, and Microsoft has it in spades.
The most important point is that Microsoft just has an enormous
experience making products for millions of users. This runs the
whole gamut from localizing, translating the product into many
different languages around the world, setting up usability labs
so that people can come in off the streets and analyze how they
use it and make the product as easy to use as possible. And they're
teaching us all about their experience they have with the mass
market; in particular, Chris and his team and their strong relationship
with us. With that I'd like to turn this over to Chris Peters.
CHRIS PETERS: Thank you, Randy. First of all, I was introduced
as the Vice President of the Office Product Unit. That was yesterday.
Today I'm the Vice President of the Web Authoring Product Unit,
newly formed, and I'm incredibly excited.
Last summer a bunch of technical people at Microsoft started creating
their own home pages, and very quickly realized as we got into
the process that we were not authoring the individual pages that
make up the Web site, but we were actually authoring the Web site
as a whole. And with this, the Web itself was acting as a brand
new document type, much like a spreadsheet, much like a word processor.
So just as our thinking started to get really serious, the guys
at Vermeer uploaded FrontPage to the net. And when we saw it,
we were incredibly impressed. Not only was it almost exactly what
we had been imagining for the product, but it was better in many
ways. These guys had thought through a lot of stuff we were just
starting to realize. But also it looked exactly like a Microsoft
product. So fortuitously just a few days later there was a technical
staff meeting among all the people at Microsoft where we showed
off the FrontPage and Bill Gates saw it for the first time and
was incredibly impressed. He remarked how polished it was for
a version 1.0 product and encouraged us to talk to these guys.
So the first meeting went incredibly well. We immediately saw
the synergy and the way that we both viewed the market with-was
virtually identical and how much we could teach each other. I
have been learning a lot from these guys. Randy is a true visionary
on the Web. So basically the Internet will revolutionize the way
people share information and together with FrontPage we will bring
Web authoring to the masses.
A little bit about how important people are to any software company.
A software company's only assets is the people because technology
becomes so outdated in just a few years. It's so important that
the people at Vermeer are coming to Redmond. I can't express enough
my deep admiration for their work and the stuff they've accomplish.
So we're really, really excited. Right now, Vermeer is again very,
very consistent with all the other Office applications. And we're
very excited the way tools like the Office Internet Assistants
can tie in.
We really view the market in three pieces: We see the low end
as being simple HTML editors for authoring the standalone pages
in webs, like the page editors and many other products out there.
Word and the other Office Internet Assistants play a role here
as great editors. The widest gap in the middle is the new Web
authoring paradigm where FrontPage defines the category. At the
very high end of the market we see professional Web publishing
tools for a lot of custom solutions and very, very large Web sites.
And we see Internet Studio addressing that market. So together
with FrontPage, Microsoft has a full line of tools to address
the broadest set of users.
You'll see in the next few months really cool ways that we'll
be able to integrate FrontPage in with Office. We'll continue
to sell them as a separate box, but we will have very, very tight
synergy between the two products. The purchase of a box of Office
and the purchase of a box of FrontPage will be the way companies
make intranets. So with that, Pete will do his recap.
PETE: The consistent message you've heard out of Microsoft
in the last 45 to 60 days, is that we're hard core about the Internet.
Today's announcement has something to say about that, and in particular
our commitment to Web authoring. Further, by having Chris Peters
take over this group and joining with the great people from Vermeer,
it says a lot about our commitment. Chris is a grizzled veteran
of 14 years at Microsoft, and not only does he have a long history
of success working on DOS, Excel, Word and Office, but the thing
that Chris is best known for is the way he's brought software
technology to millions of users. We've designed more products
for Chris' sister and his mother than almost anything else in
the last few years, and he has really helped spread this vision
of usability in all our products. We think that's the key with
the future of FrontPage. It's clearly the vision that the FrontPage
team has had.
So we're very, very excited. It will be a natural extension of
Office in a separate box, but from a product point of view you
would think they all came together. We hope to make that combination
of Office and FrontPage the leading way to build intranets. So
with that, let me once again welcome the Vermeer team to Microsoft.
It is all about the people. It is all about shared vision, and
we think we're off to a terrific start. So with that, let's open
it up for questions and we'll do our best to answer any questions
you have.
QUESTION: Either Chris or Peter. I was wondering,
can you go through what the current pricing is of FrontPage and
what the pricing would be for going forward, if there is going
to be any changes, and then from a technological standpoint ,
how compatible will FrontPage be with the Internet Studio?
JOHN: The price is going to stay the same, and right now
the single copy rate is $695. It will become available through
Microsoft channels shortly, probably within the next couple months.
The future is a wild and woolly place, right now we like what
we see at Vermeer and don't have plans to change things.
CHRIS: Again, I don't know if we want to go into Internet
Studio in depth. Today is about FrontPage, that product and these
people. We see the market basically in the three pieces of simple
HTML editors, Web authoring tools serving the biggest market in
the middle, and high-end publishing. They're all compatible in
the sense they all support HTML. So we see HTML as a key way to
put stuff out on the Internet.
QUESTION: I wanted to talk a little more about the
future of this FrontPage product. $700 doesn't sound like a mass
market software product the way we typically think of it. So are
there licensing arrangements that bring that price down, or are
there future versions planned that would bring it more into the
mass market?
PETE: The suggested retail price of $695 will translate
into a somewhat lower street price. And certainly in volume licensing
agreements our business customers will be able to get it for somewhat
less. We have no plan to change the price today. One of the leading
productivity mass market products today is Microsoft Office and
it sells for, depending on what version, between $400 and $500.
So in the productivity space, we think we'll easily have FrontPage
into a price range that can have mass market appeal by productivity
software measures.
QUESTION: What about future versions? Do you have
future versions planned?
CHRIS: Oh, yeah. We didn't decide to stop working on it
because we got these guys. No. They're all moving to Redmond and
we're all going to be very, very busy over the next few months
and next few years. We're really excited about the upcoming versions,
actually. One of any number of things we'll do will be to do the
things that make Office and FrontPage work very, very tightly
together. That will involve some work on the Office side, as well
as the FrontPage side. But in a product sense they will be very,
very closely related.
QUESTION: I want to ask about database support and whether
and how soon FrontPage will support Microsoft Sequel Server as
well as other databases?
PETE: I don't want to go into future products. You know,
closer ties with SQL Server, with the Office, with our development
tools, with our server products, is all very important and all
things you can expect us to do. It's premature at this time to
give you a specific set of timelines. SQL Server is a possibility,
but we're just not ready to give specific time lines for specific
features.
QUESTION: Greg, I wondered if you could give us some
perspective as to whether or not this was a cash or a stock deal
or a combination. And if there was an earn-out. And, Chris, as
a follow-up to the earlier discussion, could you give us any perspective
on the levels of integration you see between FrontPage and the
products making up Microsoft Office?
GREG: This was a stock deal entirely 100 percent Microsoft
stock, and there is no earn-out.
CHRIS: Again, the clear and most obvious first priority
is that the documents that are on all these millions and millions
of networks in all the companies around the world are Office documents.
We think that that's the fundamental basis of intranet. FrontPage
will be the tool that people use to manage those internal Webs.
So that's job one as a priority. There is also just tons of other
great technologies at Microsoft that in an opportunistic way we
can get in really easily.
QUESTION: First of all, is there a Mac version or
do you plan to have a Mac version and work with the Mac version
of Office?
CHRIS: Absolutely. Microsoft has been a pioneer on the
Mac for years. We like the Mac. We have a big Mac app business
and the guys at FrontPage are working hard on their Mac version
and they'll continue.
RANDY: We demonstrated the Mac version at Mac World last
week and I think people really liked it. It will be out this year.
QUESTION: The more detailed question, I think a number of
us asking questions are a little bit confused by a couple of things
that you've said. First all, you point out how all of these Office
documents are the fundamental pieces for building this intranet
Web, that those are going to be the key pieces. So that would
indicate that Word and Excel and PowerPoint and all of that are
a key offering tool for those elements. But you're not really
talking about how you're going to take FrontPage and tightly integrate
it or put it in a box with Office. What I'd like to know is what
are your very specific top three priorities over the next six
to eight months with Office on the one hand and FrontPage on the
other hand, to get them to integrate more tightly together?
CHRIS: First of all, putting it in the box has nothing
to do with integration. That's called a string around the box
the marketing people do. So integration comes from development.
Hard work on development. The point is, is that what FrontPage
pioneered and where they are a year ahead of everybody, and I
do mean everybody, is the notion that the Web is the document
type that people author. Word and Excel and PowerPoint will offer
the individual leaves or the individual little nodes in a Web,
but FrontPage would be the key technology that allows the person
to offer the Web as a whole. So FrontPage allows you to author
the nodes and the leaf notes that are the HTML which brings together
all the Office documents that a company has.
RANDY: I just wanted to emphasize that Microsoft and the
whole FrontPage team are still very, very committed to HTML. It's
very key to the product and the strategy.
QUESTION: One other quick follow-up then is FrontPage fully
OLE enabled so you can utilize it and have components embedded
in this FrontPage product that you're looking at and go off to
Excel or what have you and somehow publish it as a Web page?
MR. FORGAARD: Right. You know, FrontPage is going to continue
to really push the OLE integration, really to the max. I think
that's just a natural extension of what we're doing and what Microsoft
is doing.
DAVID CEARLEY: Thank you.
CONFERENCE OPERATOR: Mr. Jerry Michalski of Release 1.0, you may
ask your question.
QUESTION: Thank you. Randy and everybody, congratulations. With FrontPage as it's currently engineered, as you load it, it loads a Web server or you have to be running a Web server to run it. It's not as lightweight as Eudora or Word or whatever other word processor you want. This is a little bit of a futures question, so you can evade if you want to, but is there a plan to be running a version that
doesn't require me to be running a version locally, or is
there a plan to run it quicker?
CHRIS: I think you really hit this nail on the head. I think that's
really an issue of the current FrontPage before it can really
be moved into the mass market. I don't know if we would ever sell
a separate version because we think there is only one right box
to buy, and that's the FrontPage box. But making the setup issues
and all the other issues that my sister and my mom can use this
product, I believe that part has to be addressed.
JERRY MICHALSKI: Anything from your guys, Randy?
MR. FORGAARD: I completely agree with Chris on that point. And
Chris has already been talking to our team. We have some really
interesting ideas for really bringing down any barriers to use
and installation to even further down than where FrontPage is
today.
JERRY MICHALSKI: Thank you. I don't see my mom entering 127.0.0
either.
MR. PETERS: My mom can't do that yet either.
JERRY MICHALSKI: Thanks.
CONFERENCE OPERATOR: Dana Blankenthorn. You may ask your question.
QUESTION: Hi. If I go to the store today and I buy a copy
of Microsoft Office and I buy a copy of FrontPage and I load them
both, how much integration do I have? Do I have this FrontPage,
for instance, support the types of commands and buttons that I
find in Word or Excel or PowerPoint, and isn't that the more immediate
first step towards that integration? And how long might that take?
And are current FrontPage users going to get supported in that
or are they going to have to pay a big upgrade price for it?
CHRIS: The amazing thing that these guys did, which made us so
excited about the company in the first place, was they made a
Microsoft-compatible application just right out of the box. They
fortuitously did not have the time as a startup to try to invent
a lot of weird, different ways of doing things. The ways they
chose were exactly the way that Word and Excel did. So today it's
very compatible so an Office customer would feel very at home.
The word "Internet" (inaudible) LML form around word
files. So you can get the integration through the HTML. Also,
right, you know, Word and Excel and PowerPoint is going to act
as lead nodes and can be seen in the paging STKPWHR-FRPBLGTS view.
And indeed you can click on those different files with Excel or
PowerPoint nodes and edit them. Bring them into the Word and Excel
editor. In the future you'll see us making or actually interior
notes in the Web rather than just a big node. Plus obvious integration
kinds of compatibility things. I don't think that people will
have to pay a big upgrade, but that's for the marketing people
to figure out.
DANA BLANKENTHORN: Thank you.
CONFERENCE OPERATOR: David Card of IDC, you may ask your question.
QUESTION: I have one quicky. Is, in fact, Vermeer already
certified as Office compatible? And then another question, I know
you don't want to talk too much about the Internet Studio, but
is it in your group, you know, in the new group, or is it in the
Tools group? And are you sort of positioning it as a PageMaker
kind of thing on top of the mainstream?
CHRIS: Right. Again, the Internet Studio is in the developer division
at Microsoft. That gives you some clue. And, yes, I see, you know,
that FrontPage is like word and Internet Studio is like FrameMaker
or Quark, which are fantastic products, totally dedicated to their
use, but because professionals use the tools every day and eight
hours a day, ease of use is not, so far. The people who use Office
are people whose job titles have something completely different
than professional page design or graphic artist. People who buy
Office, their title says, "Joe's Dry Cleaners," and
this is Joe. Or real estate agents or office workers. So these
views are so important not because those people aren't very smart
people, it's because they're very busy people and don't have the
time to become effectively Web hobbyists to get their things done.
I think you had another question.
DAVID CARD: Is the current FrontPage, is it an Office-compatible
certified product?
CHRIS: It is not technically yet. But all they have to do is ask.
They've already done all the hard work. They have to go through
the task. But again, it's just amazing what these guys did.
CONFERENCE OPERATOR: *Lou Brosser with *Cohen & Company. You
may ask your question.
QUESTION: Thanks. I just wanted to follow up on your comments
about the customer base overlap here. Have you guys done any survey
work of the Office users to get a sense of how many people are
actually creating Web sites? Because from outside of Seattle and
Cambridge, I think there might be a different view about how many
people want to create a Web site as opposed to visit one.
CHRIS: We've had hundreds of thousands of downloads of the Internet
Assistants. This is not so much about January 1996. This is much
more about January, 1997 and January, 1998. We believe we are
ahead of the market here. But we believe that market exists and
will exist.
*LOU BROSSER: But you guys haven't done any specific polling?
CHRIS: Again, we got some experience with Internet Assistants
and also talking to the guys at Vermeer. But we are very excited
about the Web. So I'm not sure what kind of survey you could do
exactly, that would prove in any sort of, you know-you can't run
a spreadsheet program and have it recalculate and tell you what
to do.
CONFERENCE OPERATOR: Michael Putnam from Paine Webber.
QUESTION: Hi. Couple quick questions. One quick question, one complicated one.
Just give us a sense of competition and maybe if you can
give us some sense of the size of the market for this type of
product in 1995? And then the second question is a little more
complicated. You mentioned that FrontPage supports the UNIX platform.
Is there a thought that you'll be able to send Word documents
and other Office documents over to a UNIX platform and have your
viewers be able to kind of read it and then FrontPage manage such
a thing so that you would be able to use all the tools in some
sense to create a Web site on a UNIX platform?
MR. FORGAARD: The first question was about competition. Right
this instant, we have competition. Probably our main competition
is from Adobe. They have a Macintosh product called *PageMill
and a product coming out soon called *SiteMail. Then there is
also a company called NaviSoft, known-owned by America Online,
that has their NaviPress/NaviServer products. And those are well
financed, obviously, and vigorous competitors to us. Netscape
is announcing intentions to come out with Netscape Gold which
is an HTML editor and LiveWire, which is a technology for managing
Webs. So we're anticipating strong competition from them as well.
And so we're going to definitely keep our eye on the ball on those
competitors, as we have in the past. In terms of the size of the
market, next year it's-I think this is one of those things that
you just kind of look in your crystal ball. It's a little hard
to say. The Web has consistently, pretty amazingly, been growing
at 20 percent per month. By just about any measure that's-well,
since late '94, really, and we, you know, eventually, of course,
expect that curve to top out. But we're a long, long ways before
that happens. So I think all of the hype that you hear about the
Web and Web technologies and being used within offices as well
as externally is well justified. In terms of supporting UNIX,
what FrontPage does today is in a client server fashion allows
you to go out and buy a UNIX Web server from whomever you would
like. Today we support Sygnetics Web server, Open Market, also
Freeware Web servers, *CERN, NCSA, Apache, and more being worked
on. These are for UNIX platforms. And what you do is we have these
what are called FrontPage Server Extensions and you install those
Server Extensions next to your server and that works identically
whether you've got a UNIX server, NT server, or whether you're
making the Web directly on your own machine. That technology is
there today. Microsoft is continuing that vision, because UNIX
continues to be very important in the Web space. So it's going
to continue to be carried forward both from the multi-vendor platform
and also the multimedia standpoint.
MICHAEL PUTNAM: The concept of creating some things with
Word and then using FrontPage to kind of make it into a Web site,
if you're on a UNIX platform, will you be able to somehow use
Word on a PC and send it over to the UNIX platform and still use
FrontPage in the same way as kind of the glue or whatever, you
know, you want to call it?
MR. FORGAARD: Absolutely. The FrontPage client itself runs on
the Windows platforms and also soon on the Macintosh, and that
is where you would create and view your, say, for example, Word
documents or Excel spreadsheets that show up in your Web. Now,
the fact that those happen to be stored on a Web server that happens
to be running on UNIX is completely immaterial to the person who's
browsing to your site and looking at it, or the person who's authoring
against the site. So that client server separation works to kind
of forward this notion of being able to put really any popular
document format, and HTML being one that's popular, you know,
on the Web. And with the intranet becoming so important, Microsoft
Office is obviously a very important player there and the vital
formats are going to be supported as well.
MICHAEL PUTNAM: If there is any way you could quantify,
you know, the size and units, just the order in '95, a couple
thousand units that were sold or tens of thousands of units? You
know, that kind of thing? Can you give us any kind of sense of
it?
MR. MAFFEI: This is Greg. This is a market that is extremely small
today by Microsoft standards, but we believe it's an important
commitment because we see it's enormous, it's the future of all
desktop applications. This is about the long-term. This is not
about current revenue, either for this product line or the whole
opportunity measured in '95 or early '96 dollars. But as Chris
said, anyway, we think it's integral.
MICHAEL PUTNAM: I was just trying to see what number I should
increase by 20,000 a month.
ANSWER: Pick a very small one.
CONFERENCE OPERATOR: Mr. Jonathan Miller of Journal American,
you may ask your question.
QUESTION: Couple questions. First, how many employees will
be moving to Redmond?
MR. FORGAARD: This is Randy Forgaard. In terms of the actual number
of employees, almost all of the Vermeer team will be moving to
Redmond. Vermeer has currently approximately 40 employees, and
the great majority of those will be moving to Redmond.
JONATHAN MILLER: Another question I had was how long has
FrontPage been available in Windows, or a Windows 95 version?
MR. FORGAARD: This is Randy Forgaard again. FrontPage has been
available since early October on all three of the current Windows
platforms. And then as we mentioned here, it will be available
for the Macintosh in 1996. All on the client side. On the server
side, it's been available since day one on both UNIX platforms
of various kinds and also on Windows NT, Windows 95, as Web server
platforms, and also 1996 on the Macintosh Web server platforms.
JONATHAN MILLER: Third question is, Chris Peters, I'm wondering
to what extent Microsoft was working on an equivalent product
up until recently? Whether Microsoft was working on anything similar
to FrontPage.
CHRIS: We were thinking real hard about it after-again, we-once
we started making our own Web sites, all the technical staff,
we had pretty much seen that no product existed that did this
segment. Again, FrontPage is unique in that regard. We had just
started to get into the initial planning phase when we saw FrontPage
for the first time, and again, were just absolutely blown away
with how dead on it was to what we were thinking about.
JONATHAN MILLER: Okay. So there-none of this was envisioned
for any version of Internet Studio?
CHRIS: Again, what I wanted to clarify, of course we continued to work on Internet
Studio. But again, Internet Studio is more the professional market, not the mass market that the
typical Office customer is in.
CONFERENCE OPERATOR: Mr. *Guftel of Gartner Group, you may ask
your question.
QUESTION: Yes. Gentlemen, good afternoon and/or morning.
Folks, you have been talking a lot about a mass market for this
particular product and for Web authoring and site and management
tools. I'd like to get a brief explanation of what you're defining
as a mass market. Who is expected by Microsoft, and of course
by Vermeer, to buy FrontPage? And basically is this going to be
positioned as an intranet building tool?
PETE: We're maybe using the word-by "mass," we mean,
you know, 20 million Microsoft Office customers. Business-primarily
business productivity users. Turns out many of the people use
Microsoft Office and large businesses, small businesses, and a
lot of people in the home. But think of the 20 million Microsoft
Office customers as, you know, significantly overlapping with
the possible user base. We don't mean mass market in the sense
of the same market that buys toothpaste, so we may have confused
you there. We probably won't distribute FrontPage through K-Mart
any time soon. We may, but it's not where a lot of it will be
sold.
*MR. GUFTEL: Oh, so you refuse to rule out the possibility?
PETE: Of course. Turns out, if you check recently, the mass market
retailer, the Walmarts, K-Marts are selling a lot of software.
CHRIS: As someone said not too long ago, the problem with cheap
tools is it does allow everyone on the Internet. We like that.
*MR. GUFTEL: So is this basically going to be positioned-the
other thing that keeps coming up is intranet, intranet, intranet.
Is that going to be the basic thrust behind this?
CHRIS: The basic thrust is we believe Microsoft Office and FrontPage
will be the leading tools to create intranet in business.
CONFERENCE OPERATOR: Mr. Dan Gilmore of San Jose Mercury News.
You may ask your question.
QUESTION: One quick one and then another one. Are you going
to continue the Win 16 version in an upgrade?
CHRIS: We have to look at that. The Win 16 version is frankly
not selling well. Mostly because most people who are buying $200
Windows products that need 16 bytes of memory currently own Windows
95 or own Windows NT. Also, there is an incredible difficulty,
a lot of the installation difficulties are because Windows 3.1
does not directly support the Internet like Windows NT and Windows
95 does. But in any case, we are going to support what people
are buying. We're going to watch that very carefully.
DAN GILMORE: Okay. What about the-do you plan to integrate
VBScript into FrontPage the way you got VB integrated into your
other Office apps?
CHRIS: I think that's a natural thing and one of the great synergies,
opportunities. VB or VB for Applications. Also JavaScript is an
important one going down the road.
DAN GILMORE: When can we expect that?
CHRIS: We're working as hard as we can. We just got to get these
guys moved here from Cambridge to Redmond. Then we'll get real
busy.
CONFERENCE OPERATOR: Miss Gage of Computer Reseller News. You
may ask your question.
QUESTION: Hi. This is Debbie Gage. I'm just wondering if
this merger is final or if you have to go through some approval
process with the federal government. Also whether it could be
challenged or if it's just done.
MR. MAFFEI: This is Greg Maffei. The merger has been completed.
We believe that we have cleared all hurdles that are necessary
to achieve the merger and we're very, very confident that it will
not be challenged.
DEBBIE GAGE: What hoops do you have to go through? What
is the process?
MR. MAFFEI: I would rather not comment on what filing applications
we have to make or not make. There are lawyers that do that. I'm
not one. We're confident we've completed what we need to.
CONFERENCE OPERATOR: Dale Thurman, Solomon Brothers.
QUESTION: Couple questions. First question is, could you give us an update in terms
of the support for multimedia-type data, such as video,
as well as images and sound through the product? And then I have
a second question.
MR. FORGAARD: Today, you can in FrontPage create hyperlinks to
any of the various multimedia types. And that's your animation
files, sound files, and lots of other different document types.
Obviously you can create links today to Excel and Word files,
but also to PDF files. All of those things are represented within
FrontPage Explorer and you can see them today. I don't think you're
going to see FrontPage being something that directly creates sound
files for you or creates movies that you might want to put in
as animation. The FrontPage is the integration technology that
is used to pull together those different types of multimedia types
and focuses specifically on how those things get put together-as
a Web.
CHRIS: We are going to watch the types of Webs people like to make and we are going
to make it easy to make Webs that look just like that. So to the
extent that this is a type of thing that people want, then we
will put it in but we will make it easy to do.
DALE THURMAN: The second question is, once you have integrated
this product with Office and with SQL Server, what will anybody
want Exchange for? Won't it do everything that Exchange will do
once it's all integrated?
PETE: Exchange is designed to be a very large-scale mail and bulletin
board system. And FrontPage and Office have very little to do
with that. You know, Exchange is a very high-capacity scalable
server that can be connected to the Internet or intranets and
be very useful as a mail server in that environment. But per se
it doesn't create Webs and so FrontPage doesn't really interact,
doesn't supersede in functionality at all.
DALE THURMAN: Isn't it really a super set of its functionality
in a sense?
PETE: No. FrontPage doesn't do anything about e-mail, essentially.
Doesn't do anything about bulletin boards. So, in fact, they're
very separate applications.
CONFERENCE OPERATOR: Mr. Neubarth of Internet World Magazine you
may ask your question.
QUESTION: Yes. Hi. Sounds like you don't really want to
go into it, but I'm most curious about how this affects the positioning
of Assistant and Blackbird, now Internet Studio.
CHRIS: Sure. I definitely want to go into the positioning. This
is Chris Peters. What we see is the market, not just Microsoft's
offering but the market as being pretty much split into three
categories. The bottom of the category is simple HTML editors,
and that is where Internet Assistants play. And then there is
this huge section in the middle. That is this new area that Vermeer
pioneered of Web documents or Webtop publishing. The offering
of entire Webs rather than just the little tiny pieces that make
up a Web. They were the first to integrate that idea and see that
as a whole. Then at the very high end of the market, is professional
Web publishing solutions for custom applications and multimedia,
sort of large, very, very, very large Web sites. We see Internet
Studios playing in that place. So the combination of the three
is the full line that we see people wanting in this area.
MICHAEL NEUBARTH: Okay. Will Vermeer's FrontPage be extended
to support the explorer extensions?
CHRIS: What FrontPage will do is support the popular browsers.
And to the extent that the Net browser is popular, we're going
to support it. To the extent Microsoft browser is popular, we're
going to support it. To the extent everyone else's browser becomes
popular, we're going to support those too.
MICHAEL NEUBARTH: One other question. Should I call it Microsoft-Vermeer
now or Microsoft-
CHRIS: Microsoft. The deal is closed.
CONFERENCE OPERATOR: Mr. Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe. You
may ask your question.
QUESTION: I wanted to get a detail or two cleared up about
the existence or non-existence of Vermeer. Am I correct Vermeer
is no more as a separate company basically?
MR. MAFFEI: As an operational entity, Vermeer will become a part
of Microsoft. The Vermeer name will drop away. Obviously, FrontPage
will be an ongoing product. As a legal matter, the corporate entity
may exist for a while.
HIAWATHA BRAY: Right. I was wondering, because your Web
site this morning vanished without a trace, as if it had been
shot. And I was wondering what had happened.
MR. MAFFEI: We worked all weekend to make that happen today.
HIAWATHA BRAY: It worked. Now, you have about 40 employees.
I think you said the majority of them are moving to Redmond.
MR. MAFFEI: Correct.
HIAWATHA BRAY: Who gets left behind?
MR. MAFFEI: There won't be anyone left behind. People will make
choices as to whether they want to go or not.
HIAWATHA BRAY: I see. So basically all the company's functionality
moves to Redmond now?
MR. MAFFEI: Correct.
HIAWATHA BRAY: And I do want to get one other clarification
about this issue of Web standards. Did I understand you to say
basically that as other companies develop entirely different ways
of making their browsers work that go beyond the HTML specifications,
you'll look at that and decide whether to include that for FrontPage?
MR. FORGAARD: Absolutely. That's been the philosophy behind Vermeer
up until now is basically the thing that people are using, whatever
people are using out there to look at their Webs, in terms of
browsers and so forth, that's what we need to support. And that
means not just what they're doing with maybe what the HTML spec
says. What they're doing throughout the entire gamut that may
even go beyond the HTML. That's something that Chris Peters and
his team have also discovered and emphasized. This is an application,
and you want to sell applications, that's what you need to be
supporting is what people are actually using out there to view
the Web and not getting all caught up in definitions of what HTML
is and so forth.
HIAWATHA BRAY: Quickly, before we move on, I should ask
you if you have any idea when the Vermeer team will move to Redmond.
MR. MAFFEI: The transition will be occurring over the next 90
days or so.
CONFERENCE OPERATOR: Mr. Karpinski of Communications Week. You
may ask your question.
QUESTION: Yes. You talked about incorporating JavaScript,
Java itself, VB Script potentially into FrontPage. The commitment
of FrontPage is sort of a-what Vermeer has always wanted to do
is make it-is to keep all programming away from someone authoring
a Web page, and that's obviously even more important in the Office
environment. Have you figured out or thought about how to add
these scripting environments to FrontPage in a way that's going
to be usable by an Office user?
MR. FORGAARD: This is Randy Forgaard. We have done quite a bit
of thinking about that and we don't want to go into too much detail
right now. But basically, I think it's fair to say that probably
FrontPage won't be sitting there in a debugger for a JavaScript
looking at the values of variables and so forth. One thing that
is important is something like JavaScript, VBScript and Java does
allow your Web site to be more interactive and be more effective.
And it's important that not just programmers be able to create
JavaScript, VBScript and Java programs to sit within your Web
site. So through technologies which are the BOTs, and what the
BOTs do is add full text server or added discussion groups so
you can do surveys online. You can imagine that BOTs and Wizards
that are already in FrontPage could be used to create those types
of scripts without your even realizing it.
PETE: Being easy doesn't mean not having a lot of features. It
really comes down to how you design things. So our focus, the
notion of giving people the flexibility to extend what they're
doing easily is a very powerful one. We have been able to add
visual basic to the Office application. If you design it correctly
and people don't accidentally get in there and not know what they're
doing, you can have a lot of power without having it cause a problem
for less experienced users. So I think if we keep in mind the
goal of easy first, but giving the people who want more can find
it if they want it, I think we'll be okay.
CONFERENCE OPERATOR: For the last question, Mr. James Greene of
Summit Strategies. You may ask your question.
QUESTION: Thank you. Quickly, John and Randy, what will
be your new role in Microsoft?
MR. FORGAARD: My title is Senior Program Manager and I will be
reporting to Chris Peters, the new head of the Web Offering Product
Unit. I think I'm pretty much going to be doing a lot of the same
things I do today in terms of trying to keep my thumb on the pulse
of what's going on with the technology and the competition and
helping the various-the whole team figure out what we should be
putting into new releases and so forth. And I'll let John speak
for himself there.
JOHN MANDILE: And I'm actually exploring opportunities this week
to figure out what I'm going to be doing next.
JAMES GREENE: Okay. Secondly, will there be a shift in the
priorities as you assess a new technology? For example, server
platforms? Is it more of a priority, you know, to work first on
developing for NT server versus UNIX and how would those priorities
change?
CHRIS: No. The priorities won't change. Our goal is to sell FrontPage.
We want as many people to buy FrontPage as possible. So what we
will do is support the popular browsers and the popular servers,
and to the extent that something is popular, they're always the
highest priority. To the extent they're not popular, they're going
to be a pretty low priority. So there is no game. Just what's
popular, what are people buying, therefore, they need to buy FrontPage.
PETE: This is Pete Higgins. I think that's probably enough questions
for today. We really want to thank you for your time. If nothing
else, hopefully you've got some sense for our excitement and our
plans to make FrontPage and Office the leading way to do things
on the Internet. With that, again, thanks a lot for joining us.
We look forward to discussing with you one-on-one in the near
future. Thank you.