To me, serif fonts convey a sense of the classic, and sans serif fonts convey moderness. So if the top people of a company says to designers "make the company more modern", it makes sense that one of the first things the designers will do is to change the serif logo to a sans serif one. It's not always a good decision though, some industries, like high fashion (as seen in the article) and literary (e.g. New Yorker, Littler Books) benefit from being "classy" and having a serif font.
