In this new post from PHP Magazine, there's a suggestion that Microsoft is trying to "extinguish LAMP" (in this Builder.com.au article).

Microsoft engineers have toiled for years to make the company's software industrial strength and worthy of large corporations' dollars. Now the software giant faces a different challenge: fending off open-source alternatives that are good enough for most jobs.

At Microsoft's TechEd customer conference last week, executives spelled out the company's lineup to combat these cut-rate incursions onto its turf. In a new story, Martin LaMonica is reporting that "the threat of open source web application software has led the software giant to produce smaller, cheaper versions of some of its tools." Read full story.

Given that Apache is already the most widely used web server out there, and PHP has made some *very* significant leaps forward in the online world, Micorsoft should be a little worried. I think it's slightly humorous that Microsoft's argument in this artcile is mainly that they "have better tools" to work with their technologies - not that the services themselves are better/easier to use/cheaper (hah) than the LAMP alternatives...