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I don't think things win market share by how cool or powerful they are - e.g. Betamax vs. VHS OR SPARC vs. x86 OR Haskell vs. C. Why something becomes popular has to do a lot with timing, price and creating something that's "good enough".

Other than this, plan9 is/was really cool and has a lot of interesting concepts (like a distributed architecture).

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Minor nit: Betamax is a standard, but flawed example. The original betamax cassettes only worked for 1 hour, but movies last 1.5-2.5 hours. They eventually fixed it (at the cost of lowering quality), but too late.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax#Criticism

And it's another example of a win not being necessarily what yo hoped for. Ok, Sony didn't get a Beta machine into every home as they had hoped, but they got at least one into every TV station.

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