Microsoft - Zend - What does it mean?

Microsoft Corp. and Zend, a key supplier of tools used to design open-source software that competes with Microsoft Windows programs, said on Tuesday the two companies have struck a long-term partnership.

Zend deal, a multiyear partnership, will ensure PHP programs run on past and future versions of Microsoft Web server software. The pact covers both the established Windows Server 2003 and the upcoming version, code-named Longhorn.

Zend Technologies is an Israeli-American company formed to commercialize PHP, the most popular scripting language used by software programmers to build open source Web applications that pose a growing challenge to Microsoft's Windows franchise. PHP runs some of the world's most popular blogs and the Wikipedia.

Twelve-year-old PHP runs on more than 22 million Web sites and is used inside 15,000 companies.

Technical improvements by Zend and Microsoft to make it easier to run PHP on Windows computers will be available to PHP's active base of contributors for further enhancement, starting in the first quarter of 2007.

Rather than marking a sudden change of course, Microsoft is openly engaging in a dialogue with Zend, a key open source promoter, and millions of PHP developers, analysts said.

So what will this mean for Computer users? Well the contract marriage between Microsoft and Zend may lead to more and more online publishing. Allowing amatuer publishers to post online with possible tool inbuilt in word or excel or any of the windows application.

This will impact online tools such as blogger, livejournal, myspace etc in several different ways. What if Microsoft is working with Zend to allow Word, Excel, Powerpoint pages with PHP scripts allowing them to publish them online? With this I am sure we will see more and more web pages online.