I sometimes wonder if the name "ogg vorbis" hampered its uptake. MP3 is admittedly a pretty jargony name too but isn't otherwise "weird", compared to Ogg Vorbis is just Klingon-esque.
“Well I don’t think it’s too complicated,” doesn’t really say much from someone whose profession is wrangling that complexity. “Well I don’t think it’s unappealing,” doesn’t say much from someone that has no experience wrangling the different nuanced ways different things can be appealing to different people in different contexts and how that affects the way people approach and interact with stuff.
Interface design, copywriting, branding— these are all communication mediums that deal with the emotional intangibles, instincts, and irrational tendencies we all have even when we don’t see them. It’s not about taste and aesthetic preference, they’re tools to solve communication problems. Developers on a whole have a hard enough time dealing with communication in technical documentation for software they wrote, let alone effective visual communication. I’m seeing some progress in developers realizing how much more impact software can have as a problem solving tool when designers are involved… but a whole lot still think designers just add frivolous fluff and that their quirky interfaces more informed by the API implementation than how users solve problems isn’t the problem — users failing to read their wall-o-text documentation is.
I started using RockBox around 2005/2006, but it still wasn't worth converting my entire music collection to Ogg Vorbis from MP3. Right around that time, my vehicle stereo could suddenly support MP3/WMA files, and I could burn multiple albums to a CD for my truck stereo. MP3 had the broadest support across devices, and basically become an industry standard, even with the licensing.
MP3 was popular enough that most mobile devices were able to decode them via hardware, while OGG and FLAC where playable though software decoding but at the cost of using more battery.
Then WMP would play ogg, though you'd probably have switched to MPC and Winamp.
The "Og" in Ogg was a reference to "Orion ship G" in the game Netrek (https://www.netrek.org/) so definitely not Klingon :)
(Nettrek was a star trek themed online space combat game featuring Federation, Klingon, Romulan and Orion as the playable factions)
To my recollection what hampered uptake was simply that most software and especially most hardware did not support Oggs. So no-one encoding for distribution (i.e., P2P filesharing) used it. And once commercial streaming services came into being, they all used proprietary DRM-backed formats (WMA, and whatever iTunes used at the time, AAC?).
By the time digital music services gave up on DRM, MP3 patents were coming up on expiry, and MP3 encoder technology had advanced closing most of the gap between it and Ogg, especially when run at higher bitrates which cheaper storage and bandwidth made acceptable to use.
But now with many streaming services using Opus, all is right in the world again.
Fully agreed on the hw support though. I had an mp3 player discman knock off, later cheap mp3 players and none of them played Ogg Vorbis, I want to say one of my Nokia dumbphones in the mid 00s could do mp3 but not Ogg Vorbis as well.