The article author seems to have had very little experience actually in the positions that he criticizes. The truth is that actually good people in those positions are working very hard and that they have basically no resources available nor dedicated to "make it look good." The number of cycles that consumer-oriented start-ups put towards design is roughly similar to what enterprises would spend on compliance and security. Both sides are motivated by completely different business drivers - start-ups and consumer companies need design to drive customer acquisition, and enterprises tend to require sales teams to be able to engage their enterprise customers. This dramatically changes the output obviously.

Only the top-performing enterprise vendors that have been able to get the funding necessary to meet compliance issues AND design have a remote chance of doing decent UI.

Also, another factor to consider is that most enterprise software these days by the typical vendors are acquisitions, so that software has already been around for roughly... 5 years or so. After they're rebranded, it's been another 2 years and the original engineers and designers have left after displeasure with their new masters. And most of these new companies have very little interest in rocking the boat and just want to keep squeezing the existing customers for whatever and will take years and years to introduce the acquired software to their other accounts. So, by then you'll have really, really old software that you just bought.