I think the lesson is that no one has implemented a micro-payment platform that is usable / widespread enough to make a go of it. Credit card fees are killing the idea of buying content at the 5 or 10 cent level.
Or it could work the other way round, you top up your 'account' with amounts from, let's say, $10 upwards.
This could be monetized by charging businesses to integrate your service into their products.
It's unfortunate, but it seems as though the only entities with the legal and administrative teams capable of handling that are the credit card companies. And they're not particularly interested in micro-payments, it seems.
"You've read 46 articles over the last month. Contribute $9.20 now (20c per article) - we'd really appreciate it."
Sometimes it's useful to revisit an idea and look at it with an open mind. The landscape has changed. Perhaps micropayments as they exist in 2011 are doomed to fail as well but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion based on a single 8 year old article.
The closest thing to micropayments that has had any success whatsoever have been pay-what-you-want like Radiohead's In Rainbows and the Humble Indie Bundles and even there they get most of their money from the small segment that pays a lot, effectively as a form of donation that subsidizes the people who wish to only pay $0.01(or in Radiohead's case $0)
I have come to my conclusion in 2011 the same way Clay Shirky did in 2003: the trails of dead micropayment services.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.164...