I’ve been thinking about the abortive Microsoft-Yahoo! deal last night in bed, and what came to me has been crystallising in my head ever since.

Basically, Microsoft’s plan is, and always has been, to provide as much of the software for as many of the computers in the world as they can. Doesn’t sound too worrying when you say it like that, does it? Anyway, Windows and Office are their main money spinners, and have been for a long time, with SQL Server now somewhere in the mix, and I suspect Live Search and Hotmail are possibly turning a small profit these days as well.

Now then, looking at the Netcraft web server survey for this month, we see the following: while IIS has lost nearly half a percent of market share, it’s still made significant gains in terms of number of sites.

But thinking about it, that isn’t all. Most of those Apache sites will be running PHP (or Python, although this is less likely). This presents Microsoft with a block if they want to port those sites to Windows - they’d have to be re-written in ASP.Net. Well, they’ve gone some way towards addressing this in Windows Server 2008, making it more receptive to PHP support, allowing developers an easier route to migrate to Windows from Unix or Linux.

What does this have to do with Yahoo, I hear you cry? Well, let’s just look at Alexa’s global top 500 sites list for a moment, shall we?

At time of writing, the top ten is Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, Windows Live (which includes both Live Search and Hotmail, by the way), Facebook, MSN, MySpace, Wikipedia, Blogger.com and Yahoo! Japan. Now of those ten sites, Microsoft own two, as well as owning part of a third (Facebook). MySpace runs on IIS. Yahoo, Facebook and Wikipedia are all PHP-based. Checking Netcraft reveals that of the non-Microsoft sites, most are running FreeBSD or Linux. No Windows.

So what can MS do about that? Obviously it’s going to be difficult - if not impossible - to persuade all those people to rewrite hundreds of thousands of lines of code from PHP into .Net. So, Microsoft’s only remaining option is to get them to migrate the code without changing it.

Hence the interest in Facebook, and in Yahoo. If Microsoft had Yahoo - the world’s number one web site, according to Alexa - and ran it, in PHP, on Windows… You can imaging the marketing man’s dream that would be. Plus, of course, PHP is open source, handily showing the regulators that MS is no longer a closed-source monopoly but is now an open source, interoperable, kindly beast who loves nothing more than bunnies, kittens, interoperability, making things run smoothly and selling lots more Windows licences. Of course, their share in Facebook doesn’t hurt, and I’m sure a few Facebook developers have been explaining PHP to senior MS Windows and IIS developers over the last few months…

So the strategy? Long term, I expect that Microsoft will continue to allow PHP to gain ground - perhaps even encourage it - and may eventually start to proselytise the WIMP (Windows, IIS, MS SQL, PHP) stack instead of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) in their advertising.

But will they go as far as buying Zend Technology, the maintainers of PHP?

It would make a good move in the old-school playbook if they were to make the “official” distribution of PHP Windows-only, of course, with everyone else having to do their own ports, but then there’s Python out there, and with PHP being open source, someone else could fork it and before you know it, we’re in a my-PHP-is-better-than-your-PHP war and it’s all fragmented and PHP slips back down the agenda. That might wake the regulators up again…

No, I suspect it’ll be an interoperability play. Watch for the next version of Visual Studio to support PHP. PHP to be bundled in with IIS and Windows, or even SQL Server Express. Maybe for MS to start writing some of their own services in PHP.

Which raises the interesting question of what happens to .Net - and that I will leave for tomorrow.

Tags: Microsoft, PHP, Yahoo

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.