As such, I think that "democratising" and "making cheaper for profit" are far from being mutually exclusive. Companies use the word democratising because of a lack of a better word I assume. Nevertheless, and this is apparent from the article, the biggest price to pay for Slow Computing is to consecrate it a bunch of your time.
Of course you can deploy your own cloud rather than use, say Dropbox, but you will need to invest a lot of time to learn how stuff works, even more so if you are not a computer engineer. Most people don’t have time for that.
In my opinion, most profit is made when the goals of both parties are aligned. A company will make more money if the product they offer remains useful for their clients. The offer of these companies is "you will be able to use this stuff with ease" -> democratisation.
I think the "features" are getting democratized by most of these companies but other critical aspects don't. They don't either because they cost too much to implement or too much profit will be lost by opportunities to sell users out. So, as part of it gets democratized, a serious loss happens as either a tradeoff or straight subversion. The original it isn't democratized: only a watered-down, less trustworthy version which may or may not be a good deal. More good ones all the time, at least. :)
Thoughts?
The other thing I liked was how the author took ownership of the situation while expecting less at the same time. I had this experience using little-known and semi-custom OS's for high security setups. The secure system lacked access to so much stuff. Yet, it had enough stuff on it to be useful and content-proxies were easy enough to build. I occasionally wanted a certain program, Youtube video, or whatever. Yet, my system did exactly what I designed it to do, nothing more and nothing less. And, like the author, I was happy with it rather than disappointed. It's a strange, good feeling which I'm not sure most people experience while using their computers.
Of course, with KVM switch, I could always go right back to a full Windows/Linux system if I couldn't resist the urge or needed to do something modern. We can have the best of both worlds.