I generally agree, though I'm not sure financial incentive is the reason. Open source has really shown that financial incentive is (A) complex and (B) not the only thing that motivates people.
If you look at open and closed source across a lot of categories, I think it's more common to see OS "win" where the product is more objective. When it come to more subjective problems like UX, it seems to be more difficult.
If your goal is something fairly objective OS is really amazing. Take VLC's "play everything everywhere" goal. Fantastic, objective goal for and OS project that really plays to its strengths.
Linux is, I guess, the canonical example. It's fantastically successful relative to closed source competitors on every front that is objective. But, its consistently been unsuccessful as a consumer desktop.
That said, I don't think IRC is dead either. Some people/communities prefer IRC.
What you're trying to say is that open source works best when there's little or no design work involved and little or no product vision required.
Linux is a canonical example: it's simply a clone, design wise, of a plain old UNIX. The product vision was "copy UNIX". Where the wheels fell off Linux is the moment it got ahead of the UNIX legacy (i.e. modern desktops) and started having to compete with Windows, so suddenly the "copy UNIX" goal was no longer relevant. But Windows was made by Microsoft, or "the great satan" as Stallman memory called it.
So simply switching the goal to "copy Windows" wasn't possible because Windows and UNIX were very different and anyway, lots of people hated Windows. Linux had picked up a lot of semi-technical and technical users who didn't care much about FOSS purity but loved the club feeling that using an obscure OS brought them. The end result was big splits and bizarre, illogical design decisions being made simply because "do it like Windows did" was ideologically unthinkable, even when Windows had basically got it right (or at least, less wrong).
If you look at open and closed source across a lot of categories, I think it's more common to see OS "win" where the product is more objective. When it come to more subjective problems like UX, it seems to be more difficult.
If your goal is something fairly objective OS is really amazing. Take VLC's "play everything everywhere" goal. Fantastic, objective goal for and OS project that really plays to its strengths.
Linux is, I guess, the canonical example. It's fantastically successful relative to closed source competitors on every front that is objective. But, its consistently been unsuccessful as a consumer desktop.
That said, I don't think IRC is dead either. Some people/communities prefer IRC.