It seems like a lot of technology transitions go smoothly, while others painfully drag on for a decade (ipv6, Python3). Are there any common root causes for the semi-failures? Has anyone written about why some succeed and some don't?
Look at the deployment of TLS as a success story. Everyone kept on supporting both old and new, watched the percentages, and then dropped the old when the new had enough penetration.
The whole thing is also a bit of a shell game. Nobody wants to invest in it until they feel like they're "behind" if they don't. So you have a big player or two in order to make it feel like that's the way the wind is blowing.
IPv6 is a great example of how not to.
There are a handful of browsers that pushed the adoption. There's nobody doing the same in the IPv6 space.
There are areas that the browsers purposefully ignored (DNSSEC, DNS-SD) and thus their adoption is low.
And brings out the problem with IPv6- there is no sector pushing IPv6, because no sector sees the benefits.
Question is why does no sector see it? My theory is that it adds a lot complexity and planning for little gain. So no sector is going to push for it.
For ISPs, it means investments with no benefits. They do it only once their CGNAT is too overloaded or on other sign of running out of IPv4. When they do it, in the simplest and cheapest way possible, which the informed customers see as worse service, so naturally they want to avoid it.
IPv6 would help network application developers, so they could do more or do what they do now with less, but they have no impact on investments ISPs would have to do.
Then there are parties, that have working IPv4 infrastructure, feel no pressure caused by lack of IPv4, and migration would mean just expenses with zero benefits. Exactly like companies that ran login forms over http, up until browsers started to warn users. That was the incentive, that caused them to switch to https.
ASCII -> UTF8
VHS -> DVD
not as successful:
DVD -> BluRay : timing was rather close to the rise of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, etc.
1. DVD video quality is good enough for most.
2. The Combination of DRM, unskippable portions, and similar is enough of a barrier to discourage the upgrade. Personally, I will only watch a movie on disk when I don’t have time to rip it and remove that crap.
I'd be more interested in how the HD DVD as a very visible competitor blocked BluRay adoption because of consumers wanting to wait for a winner in that war.
This assumes markets with little to no competition. But most ISPs are in competitive markets with no trend setting big players and they can't waste money investing into IPv6 or anything else that has no demand if they want to keep the business alive and healthy.
Eventually some protocol is the bottom of what a group agrees to speak rather than individuals and that protocol has a completely different set of deployment issues than abstraction layers that can be built between end stations at higher levels.
The biggest problem with IPv6 is that it a different protocol that requires special support on all levels starting from applications and down to managed switches.
Has WiFi been upgraded? I believe new devices still have support back to 802.11b.
From the client perspective there is the same level of compatibility between IPv4 and IPv6: client can connect to both types of addresses.
Sure is: it weren't broke and they fixed it!
I mean, even today if you take a median python user (a devops person in a big shop, maybe) and ask them to name four major advantages that Python 3 has over Python 2... I doubt they could get past one. It's not that it isn't a better language, but for 90% of its user base who don't do library design it's almost indistinguishable. And it's incompatible!
IPv6 was similar for most of its life. IPv4 wasn't broke.
Now... it's getting toward broke. And in fact lots and lots of client ISPs (mostly mobile ones) are moving rapidly to IPv6, where their systems hit IPv6 backends of all the big content providers.
I honestly don't know that I agree with the thesis of this article. Network operators who want to deploy IPv6 in the modern world certainly can, and are. That's pretty much the definition of a smooth transition, even if its taking a few decades longer than expected.
For new projects I use ipv6 where easy and python3.6 where possible.
Maybe just a decade is not all that long period and the tech community is too impatient due the historically rapid pace of changes.
If the answers are "No", "No" and "No", I would have to say that indeed, IPv6 really is a failure, after two decades and monstrous investment thrown at it, it has failed to solve any of the practical issues it was supposed to.
It's a gigantic failure, both in a costs vs. benefits approach, but exponentially so when considering the opportunity costs of being still stuck with IPv4.
Infrastructure & Software costs money and time to switch with no real personal benefit and requires a change in knowledge. Both your examples require a hard switch and don't have a nice easy transition plan. Add taking away things that are familiar to the people in the field and you have a bad, long transition.