Its a good analogy, and one I've used myself, but so far, we, as in crypto currency adopters, are not learning any lessons.

Its quite obvious that to make something popular with the mainstream, it needs to be similar enough to something that already exists.  

Once, that has been done, then you need to make sure that the public have a quick and easy help path to ensure that they never gets spooked.

Make sure there is plenty of big companies taking the reigns, and before you know it, bitcoin will be everywhere, even if it does have a different name!

The problem though is that Linux had an easy way to sell itself - its free, as in Beer!

Now that is a problem worthy of a mystery developer ..