As a westerner that spent time in Poland and lived in one of these buildings (in a renovated unit), I can say there were things to like. The best part is like you say, the green spaces between the buildings, particularly when you had a view on them from one of the upper floors. Very peaceful on the balcony. Plus the stairs were good exercise :)
Also, I think the point of the paper is that growth gets harder, not easier. From that perspective R&D spending should have increased massively in constant currency to keep pace, not decline even slightly.
I get your message - that it's not about the platform, it's about the community getting lazy. And lazy is the key word here ... are all of these .NET devs out there hacking away at line-of-business CRUD apps really not capable of more? Is it that these things aren't being done or they are not being shared?
Originally I thought your piece was going to be solely negative, but I like the way you finished with a call-to-arms. You're right, .NET is a great platform and deserves better. Let's organize and build something worth porting the other direction :)
PageRank is almost certainly only a signal used in a learned model. An important signal, but probably one feature in hundreds, if not thousands. It was a critical algorithm to helping them overcome Yahoo in the 90's, but I doubt it is as essential these days.
What is the most important signal? Click-throughs. This is why any new search engine is at a massive disadvantage.
I've lived in both Warsaw and Krakow. Both are quite cheap, particularly if you cook at home. I contracted for an American company for a while and put about 60% in the bank without trying.