This article opens in May of 1998, just one month before the final use of the glowing puck in June of 1998. By this point everybody in that meeting must have known how hockey fans had reacted to the glowing puck. The interesting thing is that they bravely forged ahead anyways!
Execution may have been the key difference in fan acceptance. Fox made the puck into a giant glowing and color-shifting comet that practically screamed, "PEW PEW PEW!!!". These guys made a simple line that was meant to look, as much as the technology would allow, like a simple chalk line on the turf that some poor slob had to create (while erasing another) after every down. Would we still have puck-following tech in the NHL if Fox had been run by people with even the tiniest amount of taste or restraint?