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What do they use it for?

Business systems: inventory, sales orders, purchasing, forecasting, accounting, etc.

One is one of the largest master distributors of industrial supplies in the world.

Another is a web-based and catalog distributor of consumer goods (mostly apparel.)

Each has acquired 5 competitors in the past 10 years, converting all of them from whatever they were running to their 20+ year old software written in 40+ year old technology. Both were super agile long before any of us ever used the term.

(All client side web software is written in javascript. Some things do change.)

I assume that since it's mostly industrial, they don't have a thousand hits a day, etc., form random web gawkers looking to buy a doodle for their home?

I don't think his point is about what's subjectively the best language to build websites, but rather that language is not the focus of how to make a highly successful business.

Which kind of Basic? Visual Basic .NET?

That would not be a "47 year old language".

There may be concurrent instances of "super agile" and "Microsoft", but I have never witnessed one.

The two companies I cited use InfoBASIC, each on a different variant of the old Pick operating system:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system

In fairness, Pick would be a lot of the secret sauce here.

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