[cd34]

In the brick and mortar world, having multiple letters after your name signifies 'expertise'. Those companies put more weight on how many letters you have, and, Microsoft has many programs that add letters after your name while php (and the other available solutions don't).

When a recruiter or non-adult business looks at employees, they look for those extra letters. The people with those letters were trained in Microsoft, so, what solutions do you think they would offer?

One of my first jobs working for a government contractor had multiple levels of management and technicians that all had those certifications. When I was given business cards, I asked them to put S.E. after my name -- for Self Educated. Those two letters granted much quicker acceptance into the herd.

However, the largest ecommerce site and the largest search engine both are heavy users of open source. Amazon uses mod_perl (and used to use masonhq) and google uses mod_python (and ironically still uses apache 1.3 as a framework). Until IBM and Oracle and the others started to embrace Linux (or freebsd) as an alternative to the old-world solutions, Microsoft was really the only alternative. I believe Etrade and ameritrade both use apache, BankofAmerica uses sunone which is their rebadged Netscape Enterprise Server (unless they have again rebadged some other software). I would say that Linux/FreeBSD/Unix is making some inroads, but, as linux has strengths, Microsoft is adjusting their business to address those strengths.

I don't know whether I would say that Linux will dominate the financial services area -- reenigneering what is currently working surely isn't cheap, so, why move from Microsoft if your application already works. Sure, newer initiatives and capabilities might be written in linux, but, for some companies that means maintaining two teams of programmers, ones that speak microsoft, ones that speak linux. Many organizations won't split resources like that which makes a switch or co-development difficult.