> The report stated that the US had concerns about Japanese government market intervention to support the TRON OS and identified two specific markets where TRON was receiving government advantage.

The US government is one hell of a moat.

> And by the mid 80's the moats were already very deep.

You raise some good points, but I don’t think the idea of moats from the 80s really holds up. None of the obvious moats in the mid-80s are still dominant players. In the mid-80s the PC market was still pretty new. Business was still run on IBM mainframes, DEC VAX, and other systems that were overtaken by forces in the late-80s and early 90s. These seemed unstoppable until they weren’t.

I think the strongest counter example, though, is probably Linux. If your thesis was correct, an early-90s hobby operating system by some kid at a uni in Finland would never be dominant in cloud server spaces by the 2000s.

> Amiga couldn't over come the PC.

This is probably your best example. I would add BeOS to this.

On the other hand, Apple managed to attract a core audience and stay alive (even if barely) through the 90s. Sometimes you don’t have to overtake; you just need to have a solid niche.

> IBM couldn't over come the moat of Windows with OS2.

OS/2 originally lost to Windows as a successor to DOS due to execution, not because Windows had a huge moat. OS/2 Warp was a bit later.

The story of OS/2 failing is sad and as much about IBM internal politics as about Microsoft succeeding.

> Intel couldn't overcome x86 with the i432 or Itanium.

Intel bet on compilers being far smarter than they were in the 2000s (and possibly today) and didn’t seem to understand that most business applications at the time were limited by branching and integer computations. That stuff doesn’t vectorize well. The arch might be better-received today, although moving pipeline concerns to the compiler still seems like a bad choice to me.

As a counterpoint, consider the rise of ARM in the 2010s. An arch known mostly in the embedded world has become a real player in the desktop and server environment. All because of the rise of phones, reasonable licensing, and better perf/watt at low power than x86.

> Amiga couldn't over come the PC.

For reasons that had nothing to do with OS. Swap Steve Jobs with Irving Gould and Apple would be dead in under a decade too.

I wouldn't describe it as luck, it's politics. The mother of Bill Gates had access to the board of IBM. She was also the co-founder of Microsoft.

> it just needs to get lucky enough to

To not compete with something from a country which sees its interests threatened and has the power to squeeze you dry.

The US intervention to apply pressure handed a weapon to an internal player, Masayoshi Son who just happened to make money selling US software. He used that weapon against his and US' competition. It's a playbook that the US used again and again when it saw its interests threatened by competition: hit the enemy hard below the belt while handing weapons to another internal player who will also hit the enemy below the belt.

Every other example you gave came from inside the US, even from the same company with multiple products. The market played the defining role there and pushed for survival of the fittest. In TRON's case "market forces" turned out to be US intervention.

apparently China decision to ban US tech company and build their own counterpart is seen as Genius after 20 years

I was (and am again) an IT industry analyst for quite a few years. At the risk of stereotyping (and realizing they didn't have a corner on this approach), Japan long liked marching to their own drummer with designs that were out of the mainstream to a greater or lesser degree.western

I don't know Amiga well, but IBM's OS/2 efforts were plagued by several Big Blue Blunders. And both the i432 and Itanium were sounded-great ideas - for which Intel could not ship even expensive and mediocre-performance hardware in any reasonable time.

> Amiga couldn't over come the PC

Amiga was too tightly designed around its chips, which were too tightly designed around NTSC timings. The more modular architecture of the PC allowed hardware to evolve at a far lower cost.

> The technology doesn't have to be the best, it just needs to get lucky enough to become a standard and build a moat with that.

I don't know about that.

Top 500 supercomputers running Linux. I use both Linux and Win10, for instance (won't switch to Win11 no matter what), but whenever I have to use Windows, I wonder how this garbage could ever become so dominating in the first place. Inefficiency is very clearly a work culture at Microsoft; I notice this every time I copy data. And then wingers for Windows babble about how Microsoft does so much more behind the scenes - all of which is totally pointless. It is such an utter trash operating system, so I can not agree with "it it is ok to suck" statements. I much prefer solid engineering at all times.

Is it luck or bold product and marketing decision?

Being first could be luck, or it can be foresight.