In the first half of the 20th century, industrial giants like Ford, General Electric, AT&T and many others were extremely consumer-focused
I couldn't really read any more of the article after seeing this outright lie. In the first half of the 20th century, At&T wouldn't even let you plug in a third party telephone. How is that customer focused in any way?
It's customer focused because it allowed them to enforce strict standards[1] with regard to how devices on the telephone network behaves, which in turn let them provide high quality telephone service to a huge number of people. The Bell telephone network of the first half of the 20th century was a marvel by the standards of the day.
Anyway, there honestly wasn't much of a problem with doing things that way from most customers' point of view: Bell owned the telephone equipment, but that was a good thing because it was expensive stuff, and they would maintain it for you. Moreover, there just wasn't much opportunity for differentiation in CPEs (customer premise equipment, the stuff in your house): battery technology wasn't at the point where wireless handsets made sense, commodity answering machines were a long way off, et cetera. In total, in terms of Bell's ability to roll out the network quickly, it was probably a net win with regard to the technology that they kept the whole thing closed.
Now, obviously it also gave them the opportunity to act pretty anti-competitively, and obviously that was not good for customers. But it's often been observed that huge infrastructure buildouts are much more efficiently done under central control, and given the choice between the Federal government doing it and Ma Bell doing it, I'll take the latter.
[1] I've read and implemented most of the Bellcore standards; in the past I worked on a team doing integrated telephone line control circuits (SLICs), and if you think fifteen years of web standards turns into a rats nest, try implementing 100 years of standards plus working around well-known cases that break those standards but are too widespread to ignore. The telephony equivalent of IE6 is the Casio Phonemate answering machine. That single piece of equipment is, I shit you not, singlehandedly responsible for about a 10% bloat in the cost of telephony equipment because it sold so many units and yet so badly breaks the ringing standard.
I couldn't really read any more of the article after seeing this outright lie. In the first half of the 20th century, At&T wouldn't even let you plug in a third party telephone. How is that customer focused in any way?