'timing is everything'
During my 27 years in Telecommunications, I saw this kind of bad timing a lot. You would see an incremental development of a particular technology and be really impressed. But, 12/24 months later there would be a leap frog moment and something so big arrived that - even with it's limitations - it would sweep all before it.
One very small scale example: After audio cassette, we got MiniDisc because CD was still expensive and could not be customer recorded except at great expense. The sound quality was very high and it was flexible. Then the MP3 arrived, with lower quality but it was smaller and easier to handle.