My own theory on this is more cynical; I believe that several people probably invented calculus before either Sir Isaac Newton or Gottfried Wilhelm Liebnitz but couldn't popularise it. In other words, that it's not a question of the time being right for the invention, but one of society being ready to accept the sales pitch popularising the invention.
That's been illustrated by the acceptance of open source over the last few years. In reality academics have applied the basic ideas behind open source -- peer review and building on the work of others -- since the formulation of the scientific method in the 15th century. It's only today, however, that the Internet has enabled the idea to explode out of academia and into daily commerce.
It's interesting, therefore, to ask whether Sun Microsystems' move to Open Solaris is anything more than just a case of jumping on a moving bandwagon.
I believe it is, but I don't know whether the decision reflected Sun's history and general support for open-source ideas or anticipation of what now look like the most likely consequences.
Look at Java today and you see an illustration of the opposite case: one in which it's fairly clear that the people at Sun who launched it had no idea how strategic it would become. Java started as a solution to a problem affecting many devices that embed software, including as the archetypical case the set-top Internet access controller James Gosling originally worked with.
The problem manufacturers face with these things is that both the hardware and the user software inevitably evolve, leaving the manufacturer to face the cost and complexity of supporting many different release combinations.
Java's answer was to modularise the problem by abstracting the hardware and so allow many generations of the user software to address the same virtual machine while also minimising the cost of adapting to hardware change by limiting its impact.
Java's virtual machine solution is so obviously applicable to a wide variety of problems that Sun's senior management felt justified in budgeting for the work and later expanding Java marketing beyond the embedded SPARC part of their business through the creation of the worldwide Java development community.
As a result, at least three times as many people will use Java today as will use all Microsoft products put together -- for example, more than 600 million people are likely to use a Java-enabled phone today. That was predictable, but what wasn't was that Java would also become the keystone element in Sun's commercial software offerings.
That didn't happen because Java is better than other languages like C. It isn't. In fact, it's an obvious kludge when used in business information processing. Java's ascendancy happened because Microsoft subverted the use of browsers as a kind of universal client while letting its own security and runtime inconsistency problems get worse.
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