Comment by mpweiher

Inasmuch as hardware exists to run software, so software is the customer, the hardware people were wrong by definition, as they created a product that their customers weren't asking for, didn't want and had no use for.

Might segmentation have been better if the software had wanted it? Well, it's a counterfactual, so in some sense we can't know. And we can argue why we believe one or the other is better, but the evidence seems to be pretty overwhelming. It's not that there weren't (and aren't) operating systems that use segmentation, but somehow their "better" memory model didn't take the world by storm.