Even though Inferno has been shadowed by the Java hype, it is inself sprinkled with hype (the same operating system on your PC as in your intelligent toaster sounds a bit fantastic.) Technically, Inferno and Limbo contain a lot of neat features, and intelligent design decisions, but as history has shown, this is not enough to make a system widespread and popular.
The Limbo language is a good example of how things should be abstracted, but the static nature of the language is somewhat annoying for anyone who has worked with a truly dynamic language. Luckily, Limbo is not the only possible language that can be used with the Dis virtual machine, even though there are no actual implementations of other languages yet.
The chance for Inferno lies in the future, especially if Java and JavaOS fails to meet the high expectations people have of it right now. It would be more likely for Inferno to succeed if a free source code version could be distributed, because otherwise the public domain market will probably ignore the platform. The commercial software makers only support a system with large markets, and a large market is not likely to appear without a lot of high-quality commercial software, or a lot of public domain software. Java has succeeded somewhat by making the specification open for anyone, but the killer Java application is yet to be written. Making a public beta of Inferno available for the most popular platform was an intelligent move, but not enough to create real interest in the product. Hopefully the marketing people at Lucent have a clear strategy, because it would be a shame to throw yet another nice operating system approach into the garbage can of history.