[aleph_minus_one]

I rather see a reason that many such cancelled projects had very elegant architectures/structures, which is something that hackers love.

If you want to ship a product so that it becomes commercially successful, you often have to "deeply taint" this clear vision to make the product compatible with the multitude of very inelegant (industry) standards that customers expect/require.

Thus the nostalgia is not about shipping vs not shipping, but about keeping an elegant vision or be willing to taint it to be compatible with a "depraved" world.

[qingcharles]

Right. Most cancelled projects are beautifully architected and discount tons of installed products with all their decades of cruft.

Then you start trying to bring the New Thing(r) into the Real World(tm) and there are 5000 edge cases the original project dealt with in a 42-page if/else block for 270 different OEM patches that were sold by some JV team in another building who have never written a line of code in their lives.

[fasa99]

"Brother, it's edge cases all the way down" - Alan Tuna Turing