1. It's clear that Linux 'won' in the marketplace so we can all laugh at how wrong this guy was and the curiosity of these 'microkernel' things and that portability stuff. Lols all around.
2. We've reached a point where ideas are gaining ground about immutable infrastructure, people are talking more about things with similarities to microkernels called unikernels [1] (and where they might be used [2]). Linux isn't going anywhere but these new approaches have value and were being discussed as long ago as 1992. Of course, the author got things wrong but that's par for course. It's more interesting to see ideas that are resurfacing. Incidentally, ARM was a RISC chip and now dominates Intel on mobile devices.
I prefer the second approach. So to anyone poking fun at the author, please consider that maybe this is one aspect of living in the future [3], albeit much further than than most (market timing is always underrated and academics tend to think further ahead than most people). We can also remind ourselves that 'Better' is a tricky and subjective thing to define (cf VHS tapes vs Betamax).
[1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628
[2] http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/
(disclaimer: I'm involved with both the above projects)