The article makes an analogy with the internet in 1994, which is when experienced technology "experts" such as Bill Gates were dismissing the internet as a "fad".

In my experience, the people who don't "get" it often don't distinguish between Bitcoin itself and the underlying technologies. It would be like identifying the internet in 1994 with one particular web browser, or web site, or startup. The transformative elements in this case are things like the distributed ledger for decentralised trust, the possibilities for automated micropayments by devices rather than people, and so on. For example, as per my other comment on this thread, most of the large finance companies which are investigating blockchain technologies are investigating private blockchains rather than the Bitcoin blockchain, but this distinction is often missed by the press in their reporting (indeed isn't an entirely clear distinction in this article).