How Come ZeroConf is Not Yet Wildly Popular

I have always wondered why Zeroconf adoption has been so poor. Stuart Cheshire of Apple who pioneered this technology, briefly explains one of the reasons in a presentation introducing zeroconf(6:16-7:30) at the 2006 Emerging Telephony Conference.

I imagine a number of people are thinking, well, if it's so great, how come I haven't heard of it ? And, that's an unfortunate history of marketing mistakes - I called it Zeroconf, but Steve Jobs thought that was a dull name. So he called it Rendezvous which is a really good name. But, some other company thought so too and they had registered the trademark.

Then we had a couple of Years of the marketing people and the lawyers doing their stuff. And meanwhile we had a technology without a name. So, in that two years every single printer vendor adopted it. But they didn't have a name to call it, which is why you won't see it on the box. But if you have a printer on your network, an ethernet printer, or a 802.11 wirless printer that you bought in the last couple of years, then it has bonjour in it. And, on the Mac you go File->Print and it's right there in the print dialog; No setup assistant, no wizard. On Windows we can't make it quite that easy. But you can download from www.apple.com/bonjour and just run the setup assistant and it will find all those printers on the network, and configure them for windows for you.