Nobody wants to take the risk, because to investors these are all solved problems. Nobody wants "Car 2", or "Space Shuttle 2" so they don't want "Operating System 2". The issue there is they don't realize that we are locked into tremendously bad habits which lock us out of the world.
Our desktop metaphor is trying to be paper, and robbing us of most of the force multipliers of software.
Our software has no local API or modularity, so segments of our programs cannot pass instructions to eachother in tool-chains composed of complex functions to make software *out of software* in a simple way -- even across networks of machines, exposing all functions to all as standard.
Our software is achingly inefficient top to bottom, and the ease of programming gains are marginal and could be improved upon tremendously.
Our representations are still higherarchies and ego-promoting design rather than affective or contextural or circumstantial. We don't represent the multi-threaded or simultanious or networked capabilities of our systems.
We don't have a pairity between spreadsheet representations, scripting, programming and visual programming wherein the correct metaphor can be used for the correct element of a task and linked together appropriately and interchangably.
Its not only that Linux isn't good enough, its that we need another Mother Of All Demos on a software level. We need to dump money into a fucking pit and Manhatten Project our way out of the hole we've made for ourselves so we can climb out of that fucking pit. It is only going to get worse.