For each company in this list there are another 50 failed attempts at cracking the same market. Several of which probably had the same or superior technical me

For each company in this list there are another 50 failed attempts at cracking the same market. Several of which probably had the same or superior technical merits but the wrong business approach, had personality issues, or had plain bad luck. There are likely other less sexy product ideas where the expected return on investment is much larger because the ideas aren't as obvious or the fields addressed aren't your in your typical hacker domain and haven't gotten the loving care of good software development.