.Net did actually turn out to be the big deal it set out to be,
.Net and c# have evolved into a great general purpose framework and language but the original lofty hype around .net was about turning everything into soap web services for b2b messaging with automatic discovery and blah blah blah and that never happened. JSON and Rest waltzed in and (somewhat) did that organically without the hype.
XML is a great example of what Joel's talking about. It turned out to be moderately useful but was hobbled by all the over-architecting in its early days.
Joel isn't arguing against progress in general here, he's arguing against over-architecting.
I think some of the technologies he lists are just bad, not over-engineered. Usually "complicated" and "bad" are signs of not doing enough engineering; just shipping what you have and bolting on haphazard extensions as people think of them. XML was that, and so were XML-RPC and SOAP.
You can see this happening with the newer technologies. JSON has a lot of quirks, like not having binary or integer types. So people have bolted those on. JSON doesn't have schema definitions (which are nice if you, say, want to generate code to talk to an API), so we're bolting those on (JSON Schema, OpenAPI, etc.) Admittedly, it's all a lot easier to understand this time around.
To some extent, I'm not sure if we as a field learn from the past, or just reinvent it every 15 years and do a little better accidentally. (Remember the PC revolution, and how you wouldn't have to connect to a big mainframe to do computing? That revolution died and now we carry around $1500 dumb terminals in our pockets, while all the software runs on a mainframe!)
>SON and Rest waltzed in and (somewhat) did that organically without the hype.
This is a perfect description of how it happened, and how practicality trumped the bombast of the people pushing SOAP and what later became the terrible framework that is WCF (whatever happened to Don Box? He was all over the place for a while).
Biztalk also lands nicely in the 'conceived and designed by astronauts' camp.
.Net and c# have evolved into a great general purpose framework and language but the original lofty hype around .net was about turning everything into soap web services for b2b messaging with automatic discovery and blah blah blah and that never happened. JSON and Rest waltzed in and (somewhat) did that organically without the hype.
XML is a great example of what Joel's talking about. It turned out to be moderately useful but was hobbled by all the over-architecting in its early days.
Joel isn't arguing against progress in general here, he's arguing against over-architecting.