First of all, the only USEFUL aspect of the link you provided was demonstrating they got "COBOL" right in the NW story (COmmon Business-Oriented Language).
Secondly, government, whether it be Federal or State, is hardly the bellwether of IT programming language trends (disclaimer: I'm a 24 yr civil servant veteran w/ a BS degree focused on COBOL programming). If anything, they're usually a good indicator of what is passe, outdated, or past its prime. It's simply the nature of the funding and the bureaucracy. In fact, your story highlights the fact that COBOL is so far gone as to make it impossible for California to maintain its own code. Rather than hire back COBOL programmers, the State of California would be best served to re-write those systems in another language, or replace them with an ERP system. Either way, it's safe to say you sure as hell don't want to pour anymore money into a COBOL system unless your main focus is to manage your threadbare systems on a critically small budget. California may be that desperate, but that should NOT be taken as an endorsement of the viability of COBOL in this day and age.
As far as MicroFocus is concerned, they obviously have a HUGE vested interest in keeping COBOL relevant. They've tried their best, but as time has marched on, those who clung to COBOL as the rest moved to other languages are now far behind their peers. MicroFocus will continue to diminish in importance in the IT industry unless they get off the COBOL life raft.
You can keep putting off that conversion of your antiquated and outdated COBOL systems, and keep drinking the IBM Kool Aid that mainframes are still relevant, or you can catch up and evolve like the rest of the IT industry did over the last twenty years.
Don't confuse "education" for "delusion", my friend.
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