Matt Mullenweg asks, “If Microsoft were to buy Yahoo, I wonder if that would have an impact on PHP?” I think that everyone will have to say, “Yes.” on some level. There are two ways that this impact could take place:

1) PHP is challenged to compete with other languages in the market, that’s either ASP, Ruby, Perl, Python or some new language that comes around. JSP could be re-written to be easier (ha! Like that’s going to happen). PHP is going to be challenged by these languages, at least one of which is tied into Microsoft.
2) PHP will be challenged because Yahoo! needs more of something to deal with their demand. If Microsoft is after Yahoo! for revenue/ad related things then the engines running the machines will be left alone over time. People will adopt PHP (or whatever language) because of its functionality. I personally think that WordPress is a compelling reason to use PHP, Yahoo’s use of it is not as strong as WordPress’ because its easy to get your hands on the source and learn PHP from it.

Yahoo! has a commitment to PHP at present, unless Microsoft dumps their entire staff in charge of making Yahoo! what it is, its going to be a slow transition if it were to change over to .NET/ASP. Industry leaders in the web development/software development community are at Yahoo! working on code and making choices, if Yahoo! loses interest for them they’ll move somewhere else and employ their killer PHP skills there.

PHP libraries like PHP Cake (which I’m using for a new project) make using PHP fun and easy. I think PHP will be around for years to come because of what it is: fast, easy and powerful. I hope Microsoft causes PHP to change, Yahoo! or not. I also hope that Yahoo! opens up more than their YUI library so that coders can learn PHP stuff from them as well.

Thanks Matt for the interesting question!