The Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum has, among other interesting things, this paper looking at why Symbolics Inc. failed. It uses heterogeneous engineering as a model to structure the analysis. Interesting. Crossing the Chasm also looks like a pretty good model for what went wrong, but perhaps one with less prescriptive benefits.

A quote: It turns out that technology is only useful if the environment is engineered to find it useful. I think Sun has been pretty successful here wrt Java. They've worked pretty hard to support the perception that Java is the solution to people's problems. Beyond a certain point this becomes a self fulfiling prophecy, people use the product to solve problems, hence it is a solution to problems.