I remember my employer was paying Indian consultants a fortune to build a web app in ASP that didn't work. I told them I could do it in PHP in a week, but they didn't trust some "free program."
I've saved a startup once from going bankrupt more or less like this.
They were paying a lot for ASP and a shitty product(cant remember the name..it was something like WebObjects) that was taking too long to load, the newly born company i was hired for would cease to exist, so even thought i was hired as a sysadmin to manage the network, linux and databases, i've used my low skills as a programmer, without nobody asking me, and designed the thing in secret, in about two or three weeks with PHP, Linux and MySql instead.
The (news based, with a lot of personalization page) loaded in about 400 milliseconds instead of what once was a 10 seconds load.
My bosses were a little skeptic at first, because the ASP folks was a team formed with university professors and skilled pros, and i was a teen that was not even hired as a coder. Also it was so much faster that they thought i could only be cheating somehow (like static instead of personalized with data from a backend db)..
Linux and open source was also faced with skepticism, specially when confronted with Microsoft stuff that everybody was used to back then.
The LAMP stack was a wonder back in those days, and it helped a lot to popularize Linux, MySQL, Apache and PHP.
I know today PHP doesn't look so cool giving all the other players, but in the context it was launched it was so much better than all the status quo of the nineties where the options were quite limited.
Ha, I can relate to that. Met a potential in the mid-2000s who lived down the road running a travel agency which was falling over due to bugs in its web app. He knew nothing about technology other than that his app needed to parse "an XML" to work properly. "Can you get the XMLs working?". As soon as he showed me a couple of files I realised it was a Classic ASP site written in VBScript running on some overpriced Windows host so I offered to rewrite it in PHP. No chance - in his mind "the XMLs" were glued to the original code.
