This happens in other areas besides applications as well. Programming languages, operating systems. This leads to an eternal re-invention of the wheel in different forms without ever really moving on.
I refer to these as "unstable industries" - they all exhibit the dynamics that the consequences of success undermines the reasons for that success in the first place. So for example, the key factor that makes an editor or new devtool popular is that it lets you accomplish your task and then gets out of the way, but when you've developed a successful editor or devtool, lots of programmers want to help work on it, they all want to make their mark, and suddenly it gets in your way instead of out of your way. For a social network, the primary driver of success is that all the cool kids who you want to be like are on it, which makes everyone want to get on it, and suddenly the majority of people on it aren't cool. For a review site, the primary driver of success is that people are honest and sharing their experiences out of the goodness of their heart, which brings in readers, which makes the products being reviewed really want to game the reviews, which destroys the trustworthiness of the reviews.
All of these industries are cyclical, and you can make a lot of money - tens of billions of dollars - if you time your entry & exit at the right parts of the cycle. The problem is that actually figuring out that timing is non-trivial (and left as an exercise for the reader), and then you have to contend with a large amount of work and similarly hungry competitors.
We started out with OS threads (I guess processes came first but whatever) and now we're trying to figure out what the next paradigm should be. It looks to me like it's Hoare (channels, etc) for systems programming and actors for distributed systems, both really really old ideas. To be fair there are other ideas (STM, futures, etc) that fill their own niches, but they either specialize on a smaller problem (futures) or they're still not quite ready for popular adoption (STM). If this is cyclical then I think we're pretty early in the first cycle.
Sure, the spotlight moves from one model to the other and back, but that's because the hype train cannot focus on many things at the same time, not because the ideas go out of style.
Only if it is open source. Seems like Sublime Text (just an example) has avoided this effect... perhaps evidence that open source is not the best model for every kind of software?
There's a flip side to everything. In this case, if you "fixed" this problem, it would imply a steady-state world where nothing ever changed, nothing was ever replaced, and nobody could ever take action to fix the things bugging them. To me, this is the ultimate in dystopias. It's like the world in The Giver or Tuck Everlasting, far more oppressive than the knowledge that everything we'll ever build will eventually turn to dust.
Or we could get rid of humans and let machines rule the earth? Actually, that wouldn't work either, these dynamics are inherent in any system with multiple independent actors and a drive toward making things better. If robots did manage to replace humans (ignoring the fact that this is already most peoples' worst nightmare), then the robots would simply find that all their institutions were impermanent and subject to collapse as well.
You strive for excellence
You keep improving
Like Jiro did with sushi
And then the product dies with you
