The Plan 9 Effect or why you should not fix it if it isn't broken

With that said, I do think there is one trait that is common to successful products/projects ...they were successfully sold.

Now this might seem obvious after the fact but I think the amount of effort expended in 'selling' should be somewhat proportional to the novelty (and or perceived ineffectiveness )of the product. If you don't have an evangelist (on your team or external) that can sell the idea to customers, employees, business partners, investors ... your chances of success are greatly reduced.

And even then pure randomness and timing (you could be too early/too late ) will drive the final outcome.

The original Unix was not created as some sort of grand solve-the-world's-problems vision. It happened because some people on project like that, Multics, said, "fuck it, let's spend a month building something simple that we can actually use." Market 1: themselves.

From there, they found other people with needs and they solved them. Market 2 was another department that needed a word processor; they made one. Then more Bell Labs departments needed an OS for their shiny new computers, so that was market 3.

So yes, the history of Unix very much fits with the "find a market and solve their problems" notion. It's true that they weren't thinking strategically about long-term world domination. But that's sort of the point of the "identify a market" notion: vast, airy thoughts about strategy often lead to product that nobody uses. Whereas focusing solving very specific needs of actual users (that is, your chosen market) is frequently a path to success.

It's basically the same deal with Facebook. Facemash was just Zuckerberg fucking around. When he found that it had real resonance for people, he tried something more ambitious in the space. But he didn't say, "I'm going to totally change the way humans interact by creating a technological marvel." He didn't spend millions of dollars or years building amazing infrastructure. He made a small, basic product for a single school. Only when he had proof that he had product-market fit did he worry about scaling up. And he got that product-market fit by paying attention to the market, his fellow students.

Then there's the fun dynamic where if you are being really honest with yourself you don't care too much about whether there is a market or not, you just want to see the idea in your head become reality, because it would be super cool and you will feel good for having been able to do it. Which might be fine for a one-person side project, but otherwise not so much.

[1] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050414215646742

"...the number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected..." - Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, June 1972

Any product that has persisted is actually a series of products sharing same name, but each targeting a different demographic - oftentimes even actually same set of people but at different life stages. And as sibling comments point out, it is all about just trying and trying (and also, it would seem, having super convenient access to millions of people to try things on).

Of course, as you said, we don't know who the exact winners will be, but like the Richter scale, there are some indicators that can be helpful in determining the magnitude and general location of the next earth-shaking market movements. Christensen's framework recommends examining several of a product's consumer utility curves for exploitable inefficiencies in niche (and usually low-end) markets. E.g., laptop manufacturers value 2.5" hard drives for their form-factor and are less sensitive to price per GB. E.g., teenagers value the speed, ease, and essentialism of Snapchat and are willing to forgo access to an extended peer network on Facebook.

While we'll never know exactly what will succeed or fail, thinking about the market is almost always a productive activity that can certainly have a dramatic impact on outcomes.

I also don't understand why using UTF-8 was a bad idea. If I start a new OS from scratch, I would have to be brain-damaged to not use UTF-8 as the sole encoding (and other encodings being treated as second class citizens).

I can understand the issue with taking the file abstraction to perfection. If by doing that you are incompatible to most of the software there is, you're going to have a hard time getting developers to develop for your OS. This could be somewhat alleviated with a ioctl compatibility library for the time being.

There are a lot of things about Plan 9 that really aren't that good in 2016. The compiler, for example, lacks a modern optimization pipeline and generates code that is unacceptably slow by modern standards. The windowing system is not a compositing window manager; it's a '90s design through and through and cannot perform as well as solutions like Wayland (that are arguably simpler). The browser doesn't support dynamic changes and would have to be rearchitected to support anything more than simple pages with acceptable performance.

None of this is meant to bash the great work that the Plan 9 team did while at Bell Labs/Lucent, mind you. With the team they had they did a really great job, and they're all top-notch developers. I only want to counter the notion that Plan 9 is all around a technically better OS than the ones we use today. It isn't.

As sad as it sounds, most complexity exists for a reason. There is a good amount of cruft that could be dropped if not for backwards compatibility, but when e.g. compilers are concerned, you depend on that complexity for performance.

And I coming from the world of Amiga and Windows, after a decade mostly spent on UNIX land, have returned mostly to Windows world in the last 6 years.

The world has gone UNIX because it was free and for free stuff, everyone is willing to live with some warts.

Had AT&T been able to sell it in first place, it probably would not have spread as it did.

It says "no one, in the unix world". People outside of the unix world are not in the unix world. The point is, unix became very popular despite being bad (or perhaps because of being bad). Even within unix, the worse a system is, the more popular it is in general (see a typical linux distro full of randomly tossed together junk).

Which is orthogonal to a broken filesystem abstraction here and there.

Besides the plan 9 userland was hardly different or better in that aspect.

UNIX was also a research system. The following paragraph from the article would also by applicable:

"One of the major problems with Plan-9 was that AT&T and the people behind Unix, while they were incredible scientists and programmers, they were not used to create commercial software and AT&T has never been in the software business. (...) They used software and they used to produce internal software to run their high end network appliances but they never created software to be sold to someone else and it never was major source of revenue (...). This just means that they never had a sense of what could have been needed into the outside world."

If anything, this problem was relatively less important for Plan 9 given that they already had some experience in creating research systems that would become mainstream.

Edit: By the way, saying that "AT&T used software and they used to produce internal software to run their high end network appliances" seems a bit of an understatement. Quoting wikipedia: "Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the operating systems Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and the programming languages C, C++, and S. Eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories."

1) they did get the cover of Byte https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-05

And my interpretation of his thesis boils down to: Don’t scratch your own itch. Fine. I have my own explanation for why Plan 9 failed, and there are lots of reasons you can invent, based on hindsight and your own biases.

Most others, including its central premise about everything actually being a file, were not (adopted or successful), and turned out they weren't a big deal.

If from one product with 1 central premise and 10 new features the world only adopts 2 of those features, I'd still call it a "total failure" market-and-adoption wise, and a waste of time for those building it.

They could have built those 2 features independently anyway.

If I could get texlive, a graphical browser and an rdp client running under it I could live there after I retire. Until then it remains something of a toy system for me (others may disagree). I'd be delighted to hear from those using it for actually creating stuff.

Some of the people posting to the Plan 9 mailing list at that time from plan9.bell-labs.com addresses certainly hoped that Plan 9 would catch on.

In the 1990s Rob Pike tried to persuade one of the major browser vendors to support Plan 9.

Some of the people posting to the Plan 9 mailing list at that time from plan9.bell-labs.com addresses certainly hoped that Plan 9 would catch on.

However, most of your objections down-thread are "People are used to X/Y/Z, it is literally impossible to change them now."

We're not assholes unless you come talk to us without checking your assumptions and entitlement at the door.

Probably.