If people were eager to jump on an OS with very few applications, very little hardware support and no familiarity whatsoever, I imagine BEOS would have worked out a lot better than it did.
BeOS failed partly because Microsoft threatened price favours to any PC supplier that bundled BeOS with their machines. Guess why bundled BSD/Linux machines takes so long.. :S
(link to
Haiku compatible with BeOS)
There's people who like figuring things out. They already use what they want to use.
They use what's available. Although the available choices may suck.
There's people who use whatever came on the machine. They already use what they want to use.
They use what came with it because they are incapable of anything else.
There's a lot more computer
users than in the home computer beginnings. Earlier it was easy to find "alikes" now they are harder to spot
, the point being that just because people use a computer. They don't necessarly have the mind or interest to dig and learn by them self.
Any feature project may be more successful being focused on the type of people that found home computers in the beginning interesting.
