I was just at a very interesting keynote by Microsoft's Joe Stagner. He had some interesting news, so I didn't want to wait until my next php|tek daily report to blog about this.

Joe had an interesting presentation, he kept it short and to the point, and had the majority of his time dedicated to Q&A. Naturally, being in a PHP audience, the questions were about Yahoo, Zend, Microsoft's open source policies.

The most important tidbits from this sessions were:

• According to Joe, Microsoft is not done talking to Yahoo. They'll need a way to align their cultural differences, but talks aren't over.

• Microsoft has no plans to buy Zend.

The second point was confirmed in Andi's keynote yesterday, so that's probably the truth. The first part however was new to me. Joe calls himself 'Microsoft's Opinionated Misfit Geek', which probably means that microsoft is able to deny anything that Joe states. But on twitter someone pointed me to this article which confirms this story.

There were also some discussions regarding how Microsoft and Zend are working together to improve PHP on windows, which lead to some comments from Derick Rethans and others that these improvements were closed source parts of Zend Core, but Stas from Zend argued against that and stated that all Zend's fixes to PHP are contributed back.

In any case, Joe's talk was a very interesting keynote that raised some controversy among the audience.

So one day, Scott McNealy, founder and chairman of Sun, read in his morning newspaper how the use of Java was rapidly diminishing, courtesy of something called 'The LAMP Stack'. Furiously, he called his accountant.

Scott: "I knew this Java thing was a bad idea in the first place! I see only one solution. We need to buy this Lamp!"
Accountant: "Euh, LAMP is not a company. It's an acronym. It's Linux , Apache, MySQL and PHP"
Scott: "Then buy me Linux!"
Accountant: "But we still have this Solaris thing.."
Scott: "Then buy me Apache!"
Accountant: "That's a foundation. Nothing to buy there."
Scott: "Then buy me MySQL!"
Accountant: "We don't do databases."
Scott: "It's a database?"
Accountant: "What rock have you been living under?"
Scott: "Sweet. I can own the Lamp AND piss off Oracle at the same time!" (waves fake plastic magic wand) "Make it so!"

And so it happened.

Ten days later, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was reading the CIO Magazine, and read about this interesting thing called PHP, that according to the author you could use to write "WHAT?!". "WHAT?!", obviously a highly advanced and evolved version of "Hello World", caught his attention. So he called Bill Gates.

Steve: "Hey, you heard about this PHP thing?"
Bill: "Pee Age Pee? You're not that old yet, are you?"
Steve: "What? No, wait, it's a programming language, apparently better than ASP.NET."
Bill: "Who cares if it's better. I mean; we made the worst operating systems ever and still rule. (Checked out Leopard yet? It is SO cool.)"
Steve: "I don't know Bill... remember that internet thing that we didn't know about years ago? Kind of nearly missed the boat there."
Bill: "Right. Didn't we solve that in the same way? Worst browser, highest market share, that sort of thing?"
Steve: "Yes we did, but then we also didn't know about this 'mp3' thing until it was too late."
Bill: "We did manage to make Zune the worst player, but somehow we're not market leader. Guess we got sloppy?"
Steve: "Maybe it's just different times. Maybe we should have a different strategy."
Bill: "Ok, so let's just buy PHP then."
Steve: "It's not a company. But Encarta says it's written by a Rasmus Lerdorf."
Bill: "So let's hire him."
Steve: "Tried that. Didn't want to join. Can't blame him, works at Yahoo."
Bill: "Then I guess we'll have to buy Yahoo."

So it happened.

Two of the most controversial announcements of this month, and both appear to be part of devious plots to take over the LAMP stack. What's next? My prediction: Red-Hat buys Zend; Oracle buys Red-Hat; Sun and IBM join forces to buy Oracle, Microsoft buys Sun, kills IBM and peace is restored in the galaxy.

P.S. Can you imagine Microsoft running sites like Flickr? These guys invented MS Paint!