Linux

I think familiarity is a big part of why things catch on. If something is too different to what people know there will be only a few people who want spend their time learning it. And it would have to be revolutionary for these people to be able to convince others to also learn it.

It would have been helpful if in the video they would have discussed how an alternative could have even looked like and why it would be better. This is a demo of Project Xanadu, the system Ted Nelson envisions where he shows how it could work. He seems to propose that it would be hyper interconnected for every user of the system and every piece of media in it (another interview where he describes it). I'm not sure something like this could reliably work at a scale similar to the internet (he claims his system could have been the internet had they delivered it earlier) and also I'm not sure how it would work for what people actually want to do with the internet in addition to reading documents. Companies also want a certain control over the work they publish so I don't think they would like a system that connects their work to everything else. And you also have to keep in mind that there are people who want to actively do bad things so I am not sure how a hyper interconnected system could protect its users from bad actors.

Edit: Found another video where he describes and shows a version of how a document with paid content works. It looks interesting but I'm still not sure how this would work on the scale of the internet and if it would even be better than how things work right now.