Professional PHP

I ran across an Interview with Scott Collins about Mozilla at ArsTechnica. In light of Joel Spolsky’s How Microsoft Lost the API War article, I found one comment particularly interesting:

And we didn’t get out a 5.0, and that cost of us everything, it was the biggest mistake ever

This was obviously an emotional issue for Scott, and I think he is right.

Engineer types seldom recognize the incredible risk involved with embarking on a rewrite of an existing, working application. Joel’s point, is that Microsoft is making a similar mistake with their APIs today.

Harry speculates that PHP may be able to pick up some of the market share loss that this type of mistake could lead to.