Those are some really good examples of the opposite of what you intended to say.

> * Wonky unwieldy hypertext systems instead of the WWW

Which ones? Gopher wasn't hypertext, but it is still going and still a good idea. A conversion to Gopher would be a huge usability and accessibility upgrade for many current websites.

> * The Nomad instead of the iPod

iTunes is garbage. iPods sucked until (certain models) had Rockbox ported to them.

> * The Blackberry instead of the iPhone

How about the Nokia n900 instead?

> * GNU Hurd instead of Linux

I'm "stuck" with BSD. Send help?

Ambitious projects are cool and should be encouraged. Being an ignoramus about existing developments (not saying that that is what the people behind Matrix are doing) and getting distracted by anything that claims novelty should not be. Hoare had a great bon mot about this: "Here is a language [Algol 60] so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors."

The products you mention are all good examples of niche products for techies. If that's what you want, by all means keep XMPP and be happy with it.

> The products you mention are all good examples of niche products for techies.

The blind person that told me about how much better Gopher was than the modern web for blind people was not a techie, and I don't think it is moral to treat disabilities as just a "niche."

No offense to the blind, but their rest of us do want funky graphics, emojis and cat gifs.

Gopher support rich media, it just doesn't double as a client side application platform like the modern web does.

> [Gopher] is still going

Hum, yeah, most of the world is connecting through Gopher...

I don't ever remember being 'stuck' with GNU Hurd. It was a "non-product" with a little more evidence of progress than Duke Nukem Forever. Back in those days, I used SunOS (later Solaris), HP-UX, DEC Ultrix, IBM AIX, Tandem Guardian and SGI Irix.

The point is no one would try to make Linux because someone already tried hurd

The more likely outcome is that GNU Hurd would be developed to be similar to Linux if Linus chose to stick with existing projects instead.

Linux had real improvements over Hurd but it'd be silly to suggest that a separate "Linux" brand kernel needed to exist to make those improvements possible.

I would gladly trade in Facebook for Geocities (now neocities.org, it's open source replacement)

It will work this time.

We don't have much choice!