The on-again, off-again deal by the two internet giants was signed back in July, but regulatory approval by the European Commission and the US Department of Justice only came through this week.

According to a joint statement made by the new Search Alliance, changes will start being implemented very soon. Microsoft is to power the search technology on both Bing and Yahoo but each site will continue to operate under its own identity;

“Implementation of the deal is expected to begin in the coming days and will involve transitioning Yahoo!’s algorithmic and paid search platforms to Microsoft, with Yahoo! becoming the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers globally. Once the transition is completed, the companies’ unified search marketplace will deliver improved innovation for consumers, better volume and efficiency for advertisers and better monetization opportunities for web publishers through a platform that contains a larger pool of search queries.” From Yahoo’s official press release.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer previously described the move as a way to provide “real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company.” Unsurprisingly Google, which controls over two thirds of the search market in the US had tried to prevent a deal between its main search rivals. Back in 2008 when Microsoft bid almost $45bn to acquire all of Yahoo!, Google openly attacked the move as anti competitive and tried to sign its own deal with Yahoo Search Business. Google were eventually forced to pull out of that deal after the US Department of Justice questioned the antitrust implication of one company controlling what would have been an estimated 90% of the US search market.

Whether the new alliance will put a halt on Google’s burgeoning search market share remains to be seen. With a combined search market share less than half than that of Google, they certainly have their work cut out for them.

Let me give you a glimpse of what the event tries to accomplish and tell you what came out of it in 2009. MSWDS is all about communication. It is a yearly event that allows Microsoft to get in touch with key players in the PHP community and interact with them on various levels. This means they get to ask us questions, and we rant and ask them questions. It is a an effective way of getting Microsoft and PHP to do better business together, which in turn means getting better tools and better performing PHP applications on Microsoft platforms. Both sides get to know more about how the other operates.

Over 3 days Microsoft and the PHP community shared notes, discussed various products and opinions and shared quite a few beers and dinners at the Redmond Commons Campus.

Microsoft has been very active in the PHP area and even though this is often received with skepticism by the overall community their actions are generating a lot of benefits for the PHP community specifically and Windows users in general. You cannot be right all the time, so Microsoft is still making some mistakes, but it is worth looking at some of what they shared with us. The final day of the conference was held under a non-disclosure agreement and is therefore not included here.

One of the highlights of the event was a project led by Garrett Serrack describing the process and plans for making PHP and associated libraries easier to compile from source on Windows – a project that could give Windows a push as a viable platform for PHP, since custom PHP compilations are a big part of PHP sites. Also very interesting were the news of WebPI and IIS. IIS is working on being a centralized dashboard for system developers and administrators and new tools like the SEO toolkit are laying down a new track for innovation. The road ahead for this is still long, but Microsoft got a lot of feedback on the kind of deploy and maintenance oriented services we developers would like to see such as imporvements to WinCache to offer more features and make it share the spotlight with APC.

The WebPI project made life for PHP application users a breeze – its simplicity and the application gallery makes it very simple to install a complete web platform and get a site up and running. The same is not true for developers. Solutions were gathered to address developer needs – amongst these are multiple side-by-side versions of PHP and other applications, automated testing and closed cycle solutions that can contribute back to our applications as well as make our life deploying and testing before releases much easier on this platform.

During our airing of grievances many topics came up which Microsoft really needs to address. The long lead time to new projects and solutions and all the bureaucratic red tape that needs to be cut was the starting point and showed Microsoft they are the ones slowing themselves down. We also highlighted the areas of the world that need more attention from Microsoft evangelists. Recurring topics such as drivers for SQL Server and better developer tools for IE7 and IE8 came up as well.

One matter that generated heated arguments was the Codeplex Foundation. The discussion was triggered by ill-timed and not unplanned comments of an “info-mercial like” nature. Unfortunately Microsoft is still a huge corporation and parts of it still does not understand that the developer community does not want marketing pitches. The message hit home and some sessions reverted from that format, but the Codeplex idea was still not palatable tomost of the people present. The topic was later brought up in a round-table discussion and disagreements were addressed, showing that Microsoft is willing to correct some mistakes.

Some sessions had .NET solutions at their heart and were not very effective in communication, some were interesting enough to generate in us the desire to copy them, but in my opinion these were not really in their right place for the objective of this event. New technologies such as PowerShell, Azure and Silverlight got lots of attention and showed some in the room that these could be much more useful than they thought it could be.

Silverlight triggered further discussion with its use in Bing Maps – the latter is now live with very striking visual effects. Microsoft’s skill for naming projects was criticised many times especially after we figured out that the “ASP.NET Ajax Toolkit” was an ajax library that had nothing to do with ASP.NET. This was dully noted by MS for future naming.

Microsoft also had an opportunity to listen to the main players in the PHP community about the community itself, Ramsey went over some concepts of user groups and I talked about the new organization of user groups in Brazil (simple slides). We also had sessions by Marco and Keith on uncons and community participation, as well as a few sessions on tools and frameworks/closed apps.

One of the sessions explained how we can get in touch with Microsoft and gave us some insight on the internal structure and roles of all Microsoft related posts. This session was great and also opened the floor to questions from both sides.

The end result of the summit was very positive, even though we may only start seeing concrete results in a few months or even a year. The important message i got out of the conference is that Microsoft is working hard on matching Linux as a viable deploy platform and development platform, but more than that they are looking to go one better and innovate. Investing in professionals that develop PHP and its related libraries is also a way that Microsoft can help PHP to be even more viable on Windows. I guess it is becoming more viable and you should give it a try.

I look forward to some of the new tools and features of current products that were showcased in open and closed sessions – I believe Microsoft has a chance of doing great things for the PHP community.

For the team that organised MSWDS all I can say is that you did more then an awesome job: the hotel was great, social events were a great opportunity to get into more detailed talks about the day’s topics. The whole event went down without a glitch – thank you very much for all the hard work.

Let me provide some background. The majority of our team members, both in South Africa and Brazil, had been Microsoft .Net developers at some point in their careers, and some had never been anything else. We used to hire people based – in part – on their expertise with Microsoft development tools.

As a business unit, SWAT comes into contact with a large number of organisations from around the globe that are members of the MIH group. In our interaction with these companies we were experiencing a great deal of resistance to implementing Microsoft software.

The reasons for this resistance were varied but often based on cost – both the cost of the software and the cost of the people who are skilled in the use of Microsoft tools. Cost was not the only consideration – the general perception out there is that the Web is built on open source software, and that open source is where the best developers want to place their efforts and build their reputations.

It was very clear that we had to cross the great divide if we wanted to stay relevant in the markets where the group operates.

Although we had never been a pure Microsoft shop – we used Flash technologies, Javascript , CSS and their kin, as well as various tools for mobile development – our core development tools were Microsoft Visual Studio, using C# with .Net and ASP.Net, and the challenge was to change our primary development platform.

Our greatest concern was what the reaction of the team members would be – I mentioned earlier that the majority of people in the team at that time were skilled in Microsoft technology, and we were worried that the re-skilling that would be required would present us with a very steep (and costly) learning curve. A further concern was that the changeover may cause people to leave the team, rather than lose the skills they have already acquired in Microsoft technologies.

Once the decision had been made to shift our focus to open source development, we had to choose a platform. The obvious choice was PHP 5.0. “Obvious” because of the wide popularity of the language within the group, the wide support for PHP and the vibrant PHP community. An additional consideration was that PHP is fairly similar to C#, in terms of syntax and in terms of being a “traditional” object oriented language. Although we considered options such as Ruby, we concluded that PHP would represents the best option for migrating to open source.

It has been more or less a year since we finally phased out Microsoft tools, and here’s the summary of our experience:

• Great programmers do not care about the language. We lost no-one because they wanted to work only on Microsoft platforms.
• The web IS built with open source tools – and using open source tools gave us a wider audience.
• Costs for software development tools have plummeted to virtually zero.
• The Microsoft Visual Studio IDE is one of the best (if not the best) development environments available.
• If you are going to use open source, you must be willing to change and adapt all the time. Frameworks, tools and methodologies are continuously changing in the open source world – forget about well-planned migration routes for technology. Be pragmatic, and use what works. We still use Microsoft tools when our clients require it.
• Because it is open source, it is possible to look into the code to find why things do not work as expected. Often it is very hard to find the solution, and there is hardly ever a helpdesk which you can call. But you can look if you want – the option is there.
• Microsoft is not bad. In our experience it is simply a matter of choosing the most appropriate tool for the job, and the Microsoft tools are more suited for enterprise development. Although of course the platform CAN be used for web development.

In summary – the decision to go open source was the best decision for our team, and I would encourage every team that does web development to do the same thing.