From the article, Marshall states (in the Professionalism bullet:

There are uncomfortable similarities between the OSS development process and the situation that arose in the computer games industry in the early 1980s, where legions of 'bedroom programmers' produced video console games of such poor quality that, despite selling in tens of thousands, they nearly destroyed the industry.

a weak economy, a profusion of poor quality games (particularly the Atari 2600 versions of Pac-Man and E.T.), and very aggressive marketing of inexpensive home computers, especially the Commodore 64

However, video game companies also played a role in the crash. For example, when Atari issued its widely panned E.T. game, it manufactured millions of units in anticipation of a major hit. Unfortunately, the game had been rushed to market, and its low quality yielded poor sales, leaving Atari with huge stocks of product unable to be sold. The game was literally put together in mere months and rushed out onto the market.

...

Unlike Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony in later decades, the hardware manufacturers lost the exclusive control of their platforms' supply of games. This led to a flood of lower-quality third party titles. Activision was co-founded by four Atari employees in 1979, who left the company because Atari did not allow credits to appear on the games and did not pay employees a royalty based on sales. Atari quickly sued to block sales of Activision's products, but lost the case in 1982. This court case legitimized third party development, and companies as ill-prepared as Quaker Oats rushed to open video game divisions,

...

Unlike Activision, they did not have top designers to create the games. Games such as Chuck Wagon and Kool Aid Man were less then stellar examples of games that companies would make in the hopes of selling their product and taking advantage of the video game boom.

...

The rush to market of so many substandard games by poorly prepared publishers in 1982 flooded the market. When stores went to return goods to these new publishers, the publishers had neither new products nor cash to refund the retailers' money. Many, like Games by Apollo and the ill-fated Quaker Oats games unit (US Games), quickly folded. Inside Mattel, one Intellivision sales executive explained the problem by saying, "Two years of products have been pushed into the channel in one year, and there's no way to re-balance the system."

In an interesting twist, imo, the wikipedia entry goes on to point out some of the steps companies took to battle substandard game development.  This was mainly done through new uses of copyright law and forcing other developors to license the right to develop games for a particular platform.  The leader in this (according to the wikipedia entry) was Nintendo.  As is wryly noted, Nintendo's aggressive attempts to maintain control

has worked against them as their market share in the industry has dropped over the last decade.

Some other sources regarding the 1983 video game crash the curious may want to check out:
http://wiki.media-culture.org.au/index.php/Video_games:_The_crash_of_1983
http://www.emuunlim.com/doteaters/play3sta1.htm
http://www.buzzcut.com/filemgmt/visit.php?lid=3 (a Word document - I only viewed the Google translation)

I did some research on Mr. Marshall, but nothing that I can verify yet.  I think he is the same Stephen Marshall employed by Calumet Electronics Corp., but the connection is tenous at best.  He did mention the University of Glasgow in the BCS article and I also found a Stephen Marshall listed in a directory of University of Glasgow people that seems to confirm the Calumet connection.

I have not found anything tying Calumet and Microsoft together.  Likewise, nothing has turned up yet between the BCS and Microsoft (though BCS does run their web site on IIS).

Next I'm going to look at his claims about the harm to the indigenous UK software industry by F/OSS.  I have some materials here that I think will easily refute that, but I have to dig them out first.