This article is dead on from my perspective. I was one of those long-time Windows devs, started on the Win16 API, and I had invested quite a bit of time and effort into WPF and Silverlight because I thought it was cool. I remember that exact announcement, and my immediate thought was that they were ditching WPF/XAML for this new thing, whatever it was, and I just could not see where that was going. I started working in python learning django on linux a few days later and haven't looked back at Windows much since. I don't know how the .NET ecosystem ultimately was impacted, but every developer has to make decisions about how to invest the scarce resource of time, and I am sure there were many people who reacted the same way the author and I did.