It depends whether they let their own IT guys look at the technology in question. They're more likely to be influenced by snazzy tech (as long as they think they understand it), than by any goodness in the business approach.
1. Corporate entities face relentless demand for growth; when creativity fails, there's a scramble for money (control) anywhere they can think of
2. If "Internet time" means anything, certain organizations are already reaching maturity. Just like stars, they consume the easy fuel first, then use the rest.
3. Just as QOS (quality of service) prioritization was never as effective as just growing bandwidth, the organizations that are clamping down (Twitter, craigslist, ...) should understand that they are really entering a new regime, more akin to the allocation of scarce resources in the real world than the limited-only-by-creativity world of the Internet. It has differences, and they might no longer be able to sponge off crowdsourcing, at least not as easily.
Sadly, I don't think there's any kind of "social contract" with web services providing APIs. Just as the exploitation of crowdsourced data is now common practice (including personal data), most organizations provide APIs only as long as they find free access in their own interest. There's little loyalty or feeling that they owe users anything, at all.
I pretty much agree with the article; that's why I'm so depressed when I see a piecework software site advertise a job to replicate something like Facebook (only better) for $1500.
In some set of states, a "software engineer" isn't anything. To use the term "engineer" there, you must meet a rigid set of requirements; I don't think software has ever become an acknowledged field, such as "civil engineering".
Don't tar UNIX with such a broad brush. One of its important innovations was allowing someone besides the system programmers to make commands that could be used in exactly the same way system-provided commands could. A consequence is that sometimes commands were created with less care than the whole system was, or were inconsistent because there were made by so many different people. Don't confuse a strength with weakness.
(It used to be, of course, that people knew the difference between the operating system and programs that ran on it, but Microsoft confused that forever.)
I agree that it's vastly usable and fun to use; it's like a power-enhanced UNIX/Linux shell. Useful to get things done, but, except for some testing positions, useless on a resume.
I suspect part of its "failure" compared to other scripting languages is that it was so flexible that it seemed not to have an opinion, EG there are several object systems commonly used with it.
I see no comments yet on one of the biggest factors underlying highly productive programming: choosing the part of a development at which you can most easily excel. Sometimes there are legitimate areas where you have expertise, but mostly it's the well-defined areas that have no external roadblocks. And the rough parts get left for everyone else!
Apple would make you buy a new machine just to install a new application, if they could. I have confidence they will figure it out, in due time. There is, after all, tremendous pressure to maintain their revenue.
There are far more job listings for C# and C++ than for C.
C is very important for the software that forms the underpinnings of just about everything, but application level software seems to be written in easier languages.
I reacted the same way to this news as to the news that an electrical distribution system was compromised over the Internet. That is, "are you kidding me?!". Just as it's stupid to connect certain critical systems to the public Internet, it's really silly to so loosely control military electronics sourcing.
However bad instances turn out, we should view the standards process the way Churchill viewed democracy: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
as a founder of a defunct ISP (est 1991), I sure wish we could have charged by the bit, instead of connection speed. And it does seem to me that if Internet service is sold by the bit it is a communications service, not a computational service (those have legal meanings and ramifications).