The thing is, having just PHP is not likely to get you a job. Even when the economy was booming most web-dev shops were looking for "jack-of-all-trades", a bit of PHP, some CGI, ASP, a couple databases, JavaScript, DHTML, etc. That's even more so now that the arse is gone right out of 'er🙂
Of course an ASP search will turn up more jobs. As unfortunate as that is (personally I think it's more unfortunate that there are so many companies relying on ASP), that's just the nature of the beast. The purchasing power of most corporations is in the hands of a bunch of suits who, while they may be outstanding business-people, often know little to nothing about tech. issues.
When you aren't an expert in a field you have to rely on the information channels that are open to you, and marketing is one of the biggest in the corporate world. On the marketing side, MS looks very attractive.... of course in practise they usually end up looking like the proverbial "coyote ugly" who in the cold light of day doesn't look nearly as good as she did in the bar the night before🙂
Just think of it this way, for all the marketing and promption MS has put into ASP and IIS they still have fewer overall installations than Apache-PHP. The numbers that Steve put forth only indicate the installations of PHP as an Apache module. They don't include CGI installations, installations on IIS (either ISAPI or CGI), or installations on any other webserver because the webserver doesn't report PHP in it's header info (that's how SecuritySpace and Netcraft gather their stats).
The current depth of PHP developers, and the rate of growth of the language itself, is an adoption curve than anything MS ever put forth, even in it's Win95 heyday (percentages here.... not total numbers). Now that many people are more suspicious of MS, I doubt they ever will.
I think we'll see a much larger PHP presence in large business in the coming years. CF is for all intends and purposes dead. CGI-Perl still has a huge following, but the learning curve may prevent companies from adopting and more than they have. JSP has great potential, but requires a pretty heft hardware investment and is pretty buggy and unpredicatable.
ASP is a bloated language which hasn't evolved much beyond what it was when first released. At the time, it was a good allowing developers to overcome the limitations of HTML. Now it's out of date and gives very few options outside the MS product suite. It is going to be tied ever increasingly tighter into the .Nyet framework. Since many companies are getting ever more wary about MS's apparent plans with .Nyet, ever spiralling license costs, etc., they many not wish to be locked into proprietary systems which they have little to no control over. If MS suddenly changes it's plans in mid-stream, or modifies licensing terms yet again, you're stuck with it and all the extra costs it causes. PHP is currently the strongest alternative to this.
Brandon and Vincent are quite right, PHP is still an immature language (it's only been around for 5 years or so remember). In alot of ways it's incomplete and is does have it's short coming, the certain aspects in the current implementation of OO comes to immediately to mind. But, based on the strides it's made in 5 short years, imagine what it will be once it's had time to fully mature and work the rest of the kinks out!
My thoughts, not yours.......
-geoff
