The list I had in my original comment (which news.YC ate):
1. Software projects have increasingly moved from the desktop (where having a complicated runtime is a non-starter) to the server (where you can control everything).
2. Failover and hot swap capabilities are increasingly demanded for consumer apps.
3. It's now viable, from an efficiency standpoint, to have a language that copies data structures around instead of mutating them.
4. There's been a groundswell of interest in new programming languages, probably mostly because of #1. This has opened the door for old languages that previously lacked mainstream acceptance. (See also Python for an example.)
The computer industry focuses on three things, internal corporate systems, consumer applications / COTS, and embedded systems. Erlang was invented over 20 years ago because it was useful at the time for a wide range of applications. I happened to work on a business system written about that time that custom rolled a database, custom GUI, hot swap capabilities running on apple talk. It was recreated but that had more to do with OSX showing up than anything to be gained from the transition.
I would suggest that you have focused on consumer apps you may want to look up the rest of the industry because much of the new hotness is really old news. There seems to be a trend where people pull out an old idea, give it a new name and start hyping it, but new ideas are uncommon in computing.
