The parallel universe of FireWire hubs
I like FireWire and I still use FireWire (I've even used it to power a WiFi-to-Ethernet connector on a PowerBook G4), but this is a retrocomputing blog, and for the larger consumer market IEEE 1394 is now just an odd little niche. Many postmortems have been done on the death of FireWire and it still pops up in weird places like the military (see AS5643 and descendants like AIR5654A), low-latency audio, infotainment systems and some security and monitoring devices, but I think the biggest thing that doomed it was that it was perceived as a competitor to USB and failed to sufficiently differentiate itself. Device manufacturers didn't help: with the exception of some high-end A/V equipment and tape camcorders, the same devices (mass storage, webcams, scanners) showed up with USB ports as did with FireWire ports, and there were many commodity PCs that lacked FireWire entirely and many devices that were USB-only, so USB connectivity won out. Licensing costs no doubt played a major role but market perception greatly hastened the process. FireWire still has infrastructure advantages in topology, latency and segment length but it also makes devices more expensive, and even these points in its favour are outweighed by the comparatively prodigious peak bandwidth in USB 3 despite FireWire winning the bandwidth war handily for many years.