Can Node.js beat the big players in the industry? The key strength of Node.js is that it is efficient. Node.js is not faster than other platforms, at least not by orders of magnitude. It's not going to get a request completed and back to the client perceptibly faster than anything else. The only thing it's going to do that is really amazing is to do it all more efficiently so you need fewer servers. And it will only do that if your app is I/O intensive.

Where Node.js is headed, it is going to plateau. It's got a lot of popularity, I think because the efficiency excites developers and it's fun to develop in JavaScript. That will only take it so far. To play with the big boys, this thing needs to find it's niche. What will take Node.js to the next level is a business model where highly efficient, I/O intensive applications can create a huge competitive edge or perhaps even makes something possible that wasn't possible before.

The first thing that comes to mind is shared website hosting. The efficiency Node.js should make it possible to provide hosting of Node.js powered applications cheaper than anything before it. Oh, ya, that sounds a lot like Joyent. :)

The second thing that comes to mind is improving the efficiency of huge server farms, like Wal-Mart's ecommerce infrastructure. But what does that really do for them? It doesn't help with horizontal scalability. It doesn't make anything possible that wasn't possible before. It merely makes it so they can save some money on servers. Is that enough to win them over? Considering the downsides they would face (small developer pool, immature platform, etc.) there's no way it would be worth it. We've got a chicken and the egg problem here. The platform won't fully mature without major adoption, but nobody major is going to adopt it until it is mature.

So, was Node.js dead before it ever got started? I suppose that depends on what you come up with next. Happy hacking!