I have sent a lot of log files to cloud vendor trying to find why their web hosted application was so slow (6-10 second response times on a CRM app they provided). If someone would have responded with an actual answer (your firewall is blocking traffic or try this setup etc) I could have worked with that. Instead we got nothing but stealth ticket closes and “sorry we don’t know why this is slow” responses. This article hit a nerve because you really do dance to someone else’s tune when you go to the “cloud”.
The same can be said of large orgs with a large on-prem footprint.
The author wants us to look at things from the customer's perspective. The thing is, we (and presumably all major cloud providers) do. Every feature released, every API call, has a canary associated with it that does nothing but pretend to be a customer using that feature. There are definitely cases that slip through the cracks that shouldn't have (we forgot to properly test for a certain condition or combination use case etc) but the vast majority of the time a customer experiences an outage it's because of something the customer did.
That's not to excuse the 5 9 guarantee that inspires fake confidence. But we're always upfront with customers that there's a shared responsibility for availability: it's our responsible to make sure what customers pay for works, but it's also a customer's responsibility that there's enough redundancy in their architecture for their use case.
However, we will spend a great deal of time resolving their issues regardless. Last week, for example, we had a customer encountering failures with their program using our product. I obtained the source for the customer's application and debugged it for them.
I like that we do this -- it's really nice to solve a customer's problem, and even nicer to be able to tell them it wasn't the fault of our software. It's expensive, of course, but our support contracts are priced to take this into account.
There is always two sides to these sorts of things.