14 thoughts on “Yahoo, Microsoft, PHP

  1. I don’t understand the connection Matt? Do you think MS would force IIS and ASP.NET platforms on Yahoo! properties?

    It’s not inconceivable – I read that Hotmail was originally running on Unix when MS bought it, but they received such negative press for not running it on Windows servers.

  2. I’ve been wondering that as well… my guess is yes, but the impact would be delayed. I think MS would pull out and switch the site away from PHP, but not quickly.

  3. We don’t have to guess about this, we need only look at IronPython, an implementation of Python for .NET that began life as an open-source project and is now having a huge impact on the framework. This week Microsoft announced support for a dynamic language runtime, the creation of which was at least partly informed by the development of IronPython.

  4. It’s funny. Just thinking about it.

    Now, if Microsoft manages to buy Yahoo, they would eventually switch the coding to ASP.NET or whatever technology they come up with later. Move it to Windows servers etc etc. But this will take years, man power and lots of money.

    Does make much sense for MSFT to buy YHOO anyway. :s

  5. We would need to get Rasmus out of Yahoo in this case ;-).

    Seriously though, Yahoo has been working on a few parts of PHP such as APC and the Unicode support (through Andrei Zmievski, who is leaving Y anyway) lately, but I doubt that Microsoft would (assuming they *really* buy Yahoo) immediately cut of this work. In case of such a merger, there are most likely other things with a higher priority than the work of two or three employees out of 10,000.

    Trevor: Y! also hosts http://www.php.net, FYI.

  6. As a Yahoo! who writes plenty of PHP, I think it depends entirely on what Microsoft would do with the Yahoo! products. Yahoo! has fueled many of the recent advances in PHP. The new “stat-less” mode for APC came as a result of performance analysis on my project. I think in the last year or so, no fewer than 4-5 bug fixes and performance enhancements identified by my project have found their way into the public PHP distribution.

    Yahoo! is like one big testing laboratory for PHP. Obviously we’re not the only laboratory, but we’re probably the biggest and we’re the only one with people like Rasmus on-site. Take that away and, yeah…I imagine it could have some impact on PHP.

  7. production quality IIS/PHP server — a few million.
    advertising market — a few billion.
    converting .NET developers to PHP — priceless

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