There are articles and there are funny articles. To make software designers responsible for overly complicated products seems indeed ridiculous to me, But obviously it's typical management thinking that their simple mind orders ("That program must do what I'm thinking!") have to result in easy hacks to be implemented in a few days by the company's coders. The fact that

Companies are struggling to cope with increasingly difficult and complex product design projects

is correct, but I don't know of any bigger company where input doesn't come from the management (or the customer). Often enough these complex designs are just the manifestation of the quirky thinking of their orderers.