Great new ideas are common, and their developers and users want them to succeed. So why do the large majority fail to ever achieve wide adoption? For example, thousands of genuinely interesting programming languages have been invented, but few ever achieved widespread or long-lasting use. This talk considers examples and identifies some basic (but frequently-violated and hard-to-make-retroactive) strategic success predictors, that you can use to evaluate someone else’s new idea and to "design for success" in your own new project or language