A big part of the problem in my opinion, is that people are generally not interested in investing (money, time, effort) in technology. They focus almost exclusively on products. The short term is always given a much higher priority than long term.
If someone invents a much better way (faster, easier, cheaper) to do some key part of a widely used product (operating system, database, file system, network protocol), they won't get any traction until they have built a competing product with all the bells and whistles around that technology.
That can be a formidable task to a startup founder with limited resources who has to try and compete with products that have huge budgets and decades of development behind them. Investors won't touch it until you have a completed and tested product with many customers already signed up. Customers won't touch it until it is a 'drop-in replacement' for their existing solution which requires resources to finish. Classic catch-22 or chicken-and-egg problem.
You can't just find a way to do something 10x faster and expect others to flock to it.
If someone invents a much better way (faster, easier, cheaper) to do some key part of a widely used product (operating system, database, file system, network protocol), they won't get any traction until they have built a competing product with all the bells and whistles around that technology.
That can be a formidable task to a startup founder with limited resources who has to try and compete with products that have huge budgets and decades of development behind them. Investors won't touch it until you have a completed and tested product with many customers already signed up. Customers won't touch it until it is a 'drop-in replacement' for their existing solution which requires resources to finish. Classic catch-22 or chicken-and-egg problem.
You can't just find a way to do something 10x faster and expect others to flock to it.