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In the comments to this post, Gregg said:

You're confusing action in private markets with public coercion. In a private market individuals are choosing to allocate their scarce time and resources to one programming language or another. They find using one programming language allows them to achieve their ends easier than another. Their corporate action leads people to say, "the market is always right." The reason you do not extend this to the political realm is because the state can act with force. "You use programming language X or you will be jailed." When private markets act coercively, it's a criminal offense

I added a comment of my own, but I'm pulling my response up here. I don't think I'm confusing anything here. If you don't think IT shops have been (and still are) being run top down (and sometimes bottom up) towards specific technologies, then you missed the entire PowerBuilder drive of the early 90's, and the all of the Java madness of the late 90's. In both cases, existing applications - written in a wide variety of other systems - were re-written in PB or Java for no good technical reason. There's as much politics in the IT sector as there is anywhere else.