> That's like saying "the past five buildings built here burned down, doesn't that > increase our chances of the sixth building sticking around?"
My point was that the people who go on about Linux steam boxes don't have brand loyalty to a market leader. Not that previous results impact future events. However if you can learn from other peoples past mistakes then that does increase your chances of success.
Your examples sounds like there is an arsonist, if you can find out why he objected to the first five buildings and burnt them down then you can build the sixth differently.
If people had looked at the newton and decided that PDA's would never be successful then the mobile phone market would be very different.
IMO Atari would be best off targeting Apple TV first, while also supporting steam games. They are probably a little high on price for that, they need a lower end hardware offering or cut their margins. Obviously they aren't going to get enough customers if they only chase the higher end of the gamer market and try to make money on it. Because those customers will just build PC's themselves.