The perils of federated protocols

did we learn nothing?

Sure. The lesson is obvious: no matter how dominant is your platform if you stay dormant for years sooner or later someone will bypass you.

The web which we enjoy today is result of Microsoft's attempt to rebuild it today: architecture astronauts have won and instead of quickly adding features to MS IE which would make a breakout attempt impossible Microsoft decided to rebuild everything from scratch

The end result was something years later, with reduced functionality and insane resource consumption.

This gave chance to the Firefox/Safari/Chrome—but also gave developers of these monsters a false sense of security: they decided that since Microsoft was stupid all other contenders for the “try before you buy” app deployment platform will be just as stupid. The height of folly is, of course, stillborn Firefox OS but I think that the ball was lost when Mozilla decided that it could afford to dictate the rules to app developers: “it's my way or the highway”… most developers have chosen the highway… well some have picked some other highway, but almost everyone left anyway…

Some still believe that they will return, but I seriously doubt it: Apple and Google are not like Microsoft (at least not yet), they iterate fast and already made web development mostly irrelevant. I fully expect to see regression of web platform in the next few years—it'll be interesting to see how this process will look like.