It'd probably help also if they could find a killer-app role.

Currently it's a decent OS only for low-level devices like routers and firewalls, which are a fairly small part of the computing ecosystem (and even there, it has lost a lot of ground to OSes that exploit multithreading better, hence giving faster throughput).

As an application-development platform there are roadblocks at every turn and no real use-case. The community is even hostile to not-C developers. It's a shame, because the simplicity and security are great.