This needs to be said more.

Culture is correlated with technology, i.e. certain technologies appeal to certain kinds of people.

You can go to any Ruby meetup and you will see it's different than PHP meetup which both are quite different from Functional Programming meetups.

Thus I would say that it's not about the technology but about people whom you attract (i.e. culture).

I skip luck & timing, these are mostly random and one has very little power to influence them.

All three of the above communities (PHP, Ruby, and FnProg) are diverse enough that a PHP meetup in location A could be culturally similar to an FnProg meetup in location B, and so on.

you could definitely argue that a company using PHP nowadays would find it harder to find good engineers because the best ones who care about quality, performance etc don't want to work on a PHP app

Traction and Team. Luck is not a factor.

why is luck not a factor? I'd imagine it's the biggest factor that you can't control!

I completely agree with this. There were a host of similar services when Facebook appeared in my radar, I was signed up to a couple of them. Its only because more friends signed up for facebook that it seemed to have a snowballing effect. It didn't seem in any way superior (well except compared to myspace).

In Germany, we used to have a VK-like social network aimed exclusively at university students that was big before Facebook even appeared. To this day I have no idea how that died so fast and hard, and how Facebook managed to overtake it when it hadn't even translated the interface. Ze English izn't zecond nature to all ze Germans.

Ah yes, the * VZs. From my perspective, there's a few reasons. One, my friends were very privacy conscious and would often either not sign up or use a weird name (like some people do). This made it hard to find people. Two, the user experience sucked hard. Third, they had different domains for different subgroups (I remember one for school children and one for students).

Finally, if you went travelling to any other country (except Austria or Switzerland maybe), the rest of the world had Facebook. So to keep in touch, you also needed Facebook, which had a better user experience. Why bother with both?

It's a testament to the poor state of the art in user experience for early social networking sites that Facebook had a (relatively) "good" user experience. It has always been horrible, except relative to most of its competitors.

So, not luck. Despite all the down votes