Attractive design and advanced engineering are necessary but not sufficient: these days manufacturers need the image, the automatic consumer association with excitement, to lend an aura to their boxes on wheels.
Created in 2002 openMosix was a free cluster management system that provided single-system image (SSI) capabilities, e.g. automatic work distribution among nodes.
Intellectual Ventures just had a patent issued on automatic, battery-powered glasses, with a tiny video camera that reads the image off the retina and adjusts the fluid-filled lenses accordingly, up to ten times a second.