@Not That Andrew
Re "Mainframe programming language adapted to run on mainframe":
No, it wasn't. That was the main point of the MF section of the article: no changes were made to the language, and no changes need to be made to the COBOL program source. What we demoed on the MS cloud at PDC was a piece of IBM's 1983 CICS "ACCT" demo, just as IBM wrote it.
And if you think the execution environments of the MS or Amazon clouds are anything at all like those of traditional mainframes, you're sadly mistaken.
As for .NET COBOL, some customers want it, so we provide it. Use it ourselves sometimes too. Nothing wrong with it. It compiles to IL, runs under the CLI, and integrates with the .NET Framework. For some applications that's useful.