I believe that author is just pessimistic. There are plenty of examples where alternative implementation won. Sometimes to the point that the original isn't ev

I believe that author is just pessimistic. There are plenty of examples where alternative implementation won. Sometimes to the point that the original isn't even remembered anymore. It's hard to be so much better that old users will want to switch. But once you are that much better, you steal all the users of the competition. So, it could be worth a try, if you believe you can be that much better. (The original UNIX and a bunch of stuff related to it, s.a. compilers, editors etc. many of which found their reimplementations in Linux). But, not only that. Some projects live well in the shadow of the "canonical" twin. Take Cassandra and Scylla. The later is alive and well, even though may not be as popular as the former. Speaking of Python. Anaconda Python is an alternative distribution of python.org Python. They aren't going to steal the spotlight from the "canonical" Python any time soon, but they won't go away either because of some compelling features their competition doesn't offer. Honestly. I don't believe there's a pattern. The deeper problem here that I see is the lack of competition. The fact that every company is trying to build something that isn't an alternative, but a different thing altogether leads to all the different variants of what would've been essentially the same thing being garbage: because nobody has the capacity for substantial development and testing. We have hundreds of thousands custom-made e-commerce shops, all of which suck. Having e-commerce shop makers compete in the same category rather than each in the category of their own would've created a high standard for user experience of shopping online.