[crabbone]

These things don't win on engineering merits. Markdown wasn't better than others. It was like a bunch of others. It's just natural that one form of communication becomes a monopoly because people want to be able to talk to as many people as possible.

You only need to be good enough to enter this kind of competition... and win. The reasons you might win can be many arbitrary things, like someone deciding to adopt a practice in a large organization, or dedicating efforts to writing parsers in many languages etc.