I wish the author of this piece the very best with his squirrel restaurant franchise.
Seriously, what the hell is this guy going on about? The fact that large companies that create huge ecosystems also create cookie-cutter ways of doing things? And this is bad?
I've coded in just about everything out there except Haskell and Lisp. I've worked with heavy web-centric systems, distributed systems, P2P systems, and so on. I've written drivers, shell extensions, and rules-based database applications. And yes, it's true, I'm moving more to linux and F# on mono lately. But that's because of licensing and scaling issues, not because the .NET stack is somehow defective. In fact, if .NET were a liability, I would very quickly jump into something else. But it's not.
It's also true that there are a LOT of .NET developers who understand the cookie-cutter approach and can't go outside a very small comfort zone. But that's a product of being the world-wide standard, not a product of something gone wrong. When you own the game, hundreds of thousands of folks are going to go through 6-week "learn .NET!" courses and come out the other end button-pushers. If anything, those guys are a sign of a mature market, which is a good thing.
And what's this about .NET being a language? He acts like this entire system is similar to what? Javascript? .NET is a platform which runs dozens of languages with hundreds of thousands of easily pluggable libraries. If you're coding C++ in .NET writing unmanaged code you're doing something completely different from some guy dragging and dropping controls on a web page in VB.NET
This article shows the worst thing about all of us as programmers: we tend to run on assuming that we are experts in areas where we have the slimmest idea of what the hell we are actually talking about.
In fact, I feel this article is so bad that it has to be a joke: a poke with a sharp stick just to incite a lot of invective comments, like this one. Fricking linkbait. Bah.