I can see the benefit of having a platform to run decentralised applications, as described in the article. And yes one could use smart contracts for that. But

I can see the benefit of having a platform to run decentralised applications, as described in the article. And yes one could use smart contracts for that. But what I fail to see is why this would need blockchain. It just seems overhead for me for this particular use case. The only benefit I see is that mentoning 'blockchain' is guaranteed to get plenty of investor money for whatever distributed app you're building. But maybe I'm missing someting?