I did want to point something out before I forgot, but IBM is putting its corporate blessing on PHP with, among other things, a new PHP Weblog site. I was reminded of it today with a link in Dave Winer’s weblog, which disappeared.
(Hey, did I happen to mention Mark Pilgrim is back?)
Anyway, folks on the coast may not realize how significant this move on IBM’s part is. Companies in the mid-west and away from the coast tend to be conservative with technology, and usually want it vetted by one of four companies: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, or Sun. Because of this, open source technologies and languages such as PHP rarely see the light of day in the development projects here. This, in turn, means people like me can search on jobs using PHP in Monster and not find one–one–in two months of looking.
It’s going to take a while, but I believe we’ll start to see a crack in the .NET/J2EE domination here abouts. This is good for the developers, and also good for the companies.
It’s funny but as time has gone by, IBM has become more like the Microsoft of decades past; while Microsoft, with the appointment of Ray Ozzie as CTO, has become the IBM of decades past. I guess we’ll wait and see if the Microsoft employees have to start wearing blue suits.
