I work at a BigCorp that ships desktop software (but none of the above products) and network latency is (usually) pretty easy to extract out of the boot critical path. Blocking UI with network calls is a big no-no, and I expect any sizeable organization to have similar guidelines.

Work like in the OP's article is probably the most difficult - it's work that is necessary, cannot be deferred, but is still slow. So it requires an expert to dig into it.