C|Net announced that IBM is partnering with Zend to better support PHP. Besides a few minor mistakes (PHP does not stand for, “Personal Home Page” but rather the recursive GNU-style acronym: “PHP Hypertext Preprocessor”) the one point that stands out to me is that IBM is compelled to “spin” PHP as a language for small-to-medium sized applications. Why? Websphere. The company simply has to position PHP in a subservient role to their ultra-expensive web development architecture–otherwise they compete with themselves. Clearly, PHP has proven more agile than Java. But when enterprise shops continue coding PHP and forget, as IBM hopes, to switch to webpshere (or worse, switch and switch back)–what will become of this match made in heaven? Time will tell.