[peterwwillis]

Occasionally that better execution is overlooked because it looks like just a bunch of features, but a confluence of features often changes the game.

A rope and pulley attached to a vertically-moving platform existed for a really long time, and then someone bolted on a ratchet, and it became an elevator, which (with some iteration, and marketing) gave birth to skyscrapers. Another one is LXC, which existed for 5 years before Docker's confluence of features (and impressive marketing) made it ubiquitous and changed the [backend] tech landscape.

[flir]

And before them both, chroot jails... at a high enough level of abstraction this reminds me of "there are only six plots", but occasionally a book will change the world.