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 particular, the company is focused on improving its alternatives to the so-called LAMP stack, the combination of the Linux operating system, Apache Web server, MySQL database, and scripting languages PHP, Perl or Python. Microsoft"s anti-LAMP strategy is to heap features into its low-end products and to build a comprehensive set of tools--spanning development to management--in the hopes of making Windows Server more attractive.