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"Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." - Eric S. Raymond…
http://9fans.net/archive/2010/02/344
and
"Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." - Eric S. Raymond…
The first obvious answer (also mentioned in other comments) is because "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant". See Rob Pike's paper by that name: http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf
To the reasons Pike offers there, I'll add:
1. The companies that owned the software had poor strategies for encouraging widespread adoption, if that was even ever their goal.
2. The first dot-com boom ca 2000 greatly expanded the IT / programmer workforce and (I claim) significantly dumbed it down. The advantages of a new operating system lack economic impact until a huge number of programmers are trained to use those advantages. We have huge sunk costs invested in maintaining a huge supply of mostly weakly skilled programmers and admins, a sort unlikely to adapt to and adopt a new OS.
3. In a related way, the sectors that could in principle drive something like Plan 9 adoption are heavily invested, by now, in massive amounts of bloatware that, dysfunctional as it is, is both critical and non-portable.
4. Modern hardware is fast enough that fairly high level programming languages and environments tend to dominate. These often include a "least common denominator" view OS capabilities so that programs port easily among Windows, Linux, Unix, MacOS, etc. This hurts demand for OS features other than the "least common denominator".
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Why it might get better:
Notice that none of the reasons listed above apply to a market niche like "the OS for Google's clusters" or, say, massive clusters providing an SQL-based RDMS.
On clusters like that:
1) You don't need a mass audience of buyers for a new OS. One or a few big customers will be plenty.
2) You don't care about hordes of cheap, weakly skilled programmers. Paying experts is peanuts compared to your hardware, power, and real estate costs.
3) You're not tied to bloatware. You need only run a few things very, very well.
4) You don't need to do "least common denominator" programming and, in fact, any new OS feature that can save you some $s per server-hour is potentially a huge win.
My betting money is that Pike et al. will produce YANOS (yet another new OS), quite possibly mostly written in the Go programming language, really well suited for huge compute clusters.
IMO Plan 9 didn't gain critical mass because Unix is still "good enough". It's also very difficult to keep current with hardware drivers for a niche OS. However, there are some things that came from Plan 9 that are very much mainstream, the most notable being UTF-8 which was invented by Ken Thompson and first implemented on Plan 9. Linux's clone(2) system call is obviously inspired by Plan 9's rfork. And one could ar…
Speaking of Plan 9 and Go, I have to ask the same question: why isn't Go more popular?
Not substantially powerful or enough libraries for use in web dev (yet, this could change).
Global GC (inappropriate for the niche it's ostensibly targeting).
Overly opinionated about concurrency. (C++ and Java are the gold-standard for library-centric concurrency methodologies)
Go sits in an uncanny valley.
The other possible place for a big breakthrough is mobile. For example, if all of your "apps" are in Java and those apps hardly ever touch traditional unix system calls, it is easy to knock a Linux or Windows OS out from the bottom of the stack.
2. It's a research OS not necessarily meant for every day use.
IMO Plan 9 didn't gain critical mass because Unix is still "good enough". It's also very difficult to keep current with hardware drivers for a niche OS. However, there are some things that came from Plan 9 that are very much mainstream, the most notable being UTF-8 which was invented by Ken Thompson and first implemented on Plan 9. Linux's clone(2) system call is obviously inspired by Plan 9's rfork. And one could ar…
Speaking of Plan 9 and Go, I have to ask the same question: why isn't Go more popular?
They open sourced it too late for it to get much traction, I think. Also, does it solve any particular problem in such a way that it can't be ignored? Doesn't seem like it to me.
There were the problems with the license for some years. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/plan-nine.html Once it became "free" it had too little functionality. There's too little of the software and it's not so easy to port the existing Unix/Linux software: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/porting_alien_software... Moreover, very, very little of the hardware is supported.
Incidentally, the 'crossing the chasm' approach would be to find some niche where a new OS could succeed - perhaps something where the network effects were less pernicious.