Microsoft Innovation Microsoft is in a unique position to contribute. We have a $7.5 billion dollar war chest for R&D. Some of that goes directly to support Microsoft engineering efforts. Some of it goes to support efforts by our developer community. Some of it goes to facilitate better tools and infrastructure for our community. And in all of these areas, some of that effort goes towards open source software. Some innovations originate with Microsoft directly. For our many customers already using Windows Server, we saw an opportunity to open up a new range of web applications to them by making PHP’s performance in Windows Server equal to or better than its performance on Linux. STB took the lead on doing this engineering work, with the “penguins” here in Redmond’s Open Source Technology Center working closely with the IIS and SQL-Server teams. Not only does the make existing PHP applications available for Windows Server, but it also opens up new capabilities for PHP by connecting it to the capabilities in IIS or SQL-Server. For example, an ecommerce application written in PHP can leverage the enterprise reporting capabilities in SQL-Server, something not available in the LAMP stack. Customers may or may not make use of this capability. But the point is we have opened up this opportunity for innovation for our developer community to make use of.
13Call to Action These are exciting times for Microsoft and open source, and we’ll have a lot of exciting developments in the months ahead. We fully expect that our customers will look back on this time as a turning point that moved us to the next growth business cycle. We hope what you’ve heard today will inspire you to learn more about Microsoft’s open source initiatives, and to follow as the developments unfold. You can do that at http://www.microsoft.com/opensource, and through the blogs on Port25 at http://port25.technet.com.