The stereotypical "never gonna work" idea that I always see is this: * There's a sort of thing that there are many implementations of (website logins, say) *

The stereotypical "never gonna work" idea that I always see is this: * There's a sort of thing that there are many implementations of (website logins, say) * Having many implementations is confusing, one canonical one would be better (Hey! Let's make OpenID!) * They make a new one, announce it, everyone sees that it's not as mature as what they already have (Provider? XRI?) * Nobody else adopts the new one, now there's one more competing implementation for the next never-gonna-work idea to contend with. Note: I don't want to pick on OpenID, it actually works pretty well, but I needed an example. Once you start looking for this pattern you see it everywhere: Linux distros, OpenSocial, OS X package managers, etc.