Definitely an interesting article. It's written by Stern though. Thing like this line are very skewed/biased...
"All in all, SPIKE is an exciting development in the pinball world as it represents the first complete redesign of pinball control system architecture in over 20 years."
First redesign of architecture for *STERN* in 20 years. There have been many redesigns of pinball control systems in the recent years... from PROC to Ben's system for AMH to what Chicago Gaming is using in MMr.
Jaz