Many runaway successes in technology and consumer electronics are the result of luck. In the form of idiotically incompetent competitors. It happens again and again, and it's getting easier to spot. And sometimes the successful product is actually inferior.
Example 1: Sony vs. Betamax. It's the classic example: Sony didn't license Betamax, but Toshiba, Matsushita, et al did license VHS and flooded the market with an inferior product. Sony couldn't compete effectively and Betamax disappeared from the consumer space. The VHS crowd were lucky that Sony didn't wise up sooner.
Example 2: Apple didn't license Mac OS in the early 1990s, so only Apple made Macs. Microsoft was finally able to copy Mac OS well enough to have a hit on their hands after years of trying. Windows 95 took off, Mac OS suffered, Apple almost died. Microsoft was lucky that Apple didn't license Mac OS in, say, 1993.
Example 3: The MP3 player market was booming ten years ago. There were dozens of companies competing with mediocre hardware and software. Apple waded into the mess first with iTunes, then soon after with iPod, and the combination of iTunes + iPod destroyed the competition. Apple was lucky nobody saw that bigger hard drives weren't enough.
Example 4: Palm was the darling of Silicon Valley in 1995 after releasing the first successful PDA, the Palm Pilot. Competitors came and went, but couldn't unseat Palm from the throne. But Palm did every single thing possible, short of burning down their headquarters building, to thwart their own success. They sold off Palm OS, lost their founders to Handspring, bought Palm OS back again, wasted time and money on a pre-netbook-era netbook called Foleo, and refused to improve their hardware or software more than incrementally for what, 10 years? They eventually just fell behind the curve and let Windows Mobile and later Apple take the lead. Everyone but Palm was lucky that Palm was so incompetently managed.
Example 5: Microsoft first announced their "tablet PC" initiative at Comdex in 2001. The first tablet PCs were rolled out in 2002 with Bill Gates personally hyping them as the next big thing. And only a few were sold, into niche markets. Apple watched this massive failure, realized that an entirely new interface was required, developed a new OS for years, released the simplified version of this OS on iPhone first, then finally released the full-blown version on iPad in 2010. iPhone and iPad became instant smash hits. Apple was lucky Microsoft didn't secretly create a new OS that was actually tablet-friendly first. (And also didn't develop an iTunes competitor and App Store competitor in those 9 years.)
OK, that's enough...
..so meh Wii FTW, the only downside is graphics..
