Why do we abandon functional technology?

I've just returned from a trip to Australia, to attend the Hunter Innovation festival in Newcastle. Outside the Thales shipyard on Throsby Creek, just before it joins the Hunter river, Ship4Good is moored. It's a museum ship for Sea Shepherd, and was formerly registered as the MV Steve Irwin.

It's dazzle painted, like a warship from the great war - the premise was that since it's essentially impossible to hide a ship on the open sea from something like a submarine, a colour scheme was applied to break up the outline and give false visual messages that make it much harder to identify a ship, and estimate bearing and speed.

 

 

With a few exceptions, its dropped out of favour now for warships, but still used by car manufacturers to mask pre-release vehicles from inquisitive cameras when they are out for road testing.

It made me wonder about why some ideas wither on the vine: things that work well, but just don't capture the idea market. 

 

Another example might be the Beta-max video versus VHS video tape systems. The beta system was technically better, and gives better reproduction, but VHS won the marketing war.

Another might be the demise of the MS Windows smart phone. It worked well, and integrated very well with MS Windows on computer, which is the dominant computer operating system - but for some reason it didn't prosper like Apple's, admittedly elegant, iOS or Google's clunky Android.

And yet another might be the death of simplicity in design. That said, simplicity is really hard to achieve as things like proportion need to be right if they aren't buried under a welter of clutter. Compare something like a 1960's Alfa Romeo Spider to the current Fiat 124 Spider that manages to be fussy and less elegant than both the old Alfa and the current Mazda MX5 that is the modern car's donor.

What eludes me is any consistent reason why...except, possibly, marketing trying to justify it's existence, now that it's own it's battle with the engineers.