I've worked with Plan9 and Inferno. I think they both failed for two reasons: 1. lack of device drivers for commonly found hardware at the time. 2. Ugly lo

I've worked with Plan9 and Inferno. I think they both failed for two reasons: 1. lack of device drivers for commonly found hardware at the time. 2. Ugly looking graphics and desktops and difficult (relative to what was widely used at the time) to use as well. IBM's use of Plan9 with BlueGene uses the server side benefits so they need only a small number of custom device drivers and the GUI is not used at all.