Comment by throwaway2048
7 years ago
Consider also that basically every single ground up "we are rethinking everything, and doing it right this time" OS rebuild from scratch has been a failure. There have been dozens, if not hundreds of examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista#Development_rese...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiuser_DOS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)
I would argue that BeOS was not a failure as an OS, but it was a failure in the market where it couldn't find a clear place for itself, and was attempting to break into a market pretty much totally dominated by MS at the time.
Remember in the time of home computers, there were many good Systems that were pretty much from scratch implementations (Amiga, GEM and Archimedes) so the idea of creating a totally new OS against the incumbents (Windows and OSX) is not totally pointless.