Bluetooth had some early success in cellphones, mostly to support Bluetooth headsets and car radio integration, starting from about 1999. It could do other things, but the wireless headset was the killer app in its early days.

Bluetooth didn’t really hit mainstream until the arrival of chipsets that multiplexed Bluetooth and WiFi on the same radio+antenna. My memory is that happened sometime around 2007-2010.

At that point, the BOM cost to add Bluetooth to a laptop or smart device became essentially zero, why not include it? Modern smartphones with both Bluetooth and Wifi arrived at around the same time (I suspect these combo chipsets were originally developed for handheld devices, and laptops benefited)

And once Bluetooth was mainstream, we saw a steady rise in devices using Bluetooth.

WUSB operates on a completely different set of frequencies and technology and couldn’t share hardware with WiFi. Maybe it could have taken off if there was a killer app, but there never was.

My guess is just that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi came first, and when wireless USB entered the party, there wasn't a real need for it, as most of its use cases were already covered by Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

It maybe could have worked with better marketing, but convincing potential customers to change something that works (somewhat, BT wasn't without issues) is hard. That's why we are keeping abominations like cigarette lighter sockets in cars even though they often can't even light cigarettes anymore. It is already well established and it works well enough as a power outlet.

Back when Bluetooth was new, the alternative for wirelessly sharing data between mobile devices like phones was infrared.

IR was exceptionally slow, required line-of-sight and even at the time, felt like a shitty solution. So even though the early implementations of Bluetooth also left a lot to be desired (battery hungry, insecure, and also slow), it was still a massive improvement on what came before.

Wireless USB wasn’t a significant enough improvement to Bluetooth given that BT was already ubiquitous by that point, but also cheap and (by that point) battery efficient now too.

Bluetooth took off before wireless usb did and was allready useful to people when wusb came a long. It was also lower power so you could do peripherals that was smaller and longer lived.

Largest phone manufacturers of the time (Ericsson and Nokia) supporting and developing it surely helped.

In my opinion, for computers, wireless mouse (and eventually keyboards) was one of the killer app that showed pushed for Bluetooth to be common in computers and laptops. "Not needing a dongle" was a huge added value compared to the private radio protocol of manufacturers

Introducing a new wireless protocol is incredibly difficult. You basically have to have all the countries in the world to give you a chunk of their spectrum.

You have 2 mainstream protocols now, one for low energy, slow data transfers (Bluetooth) and one for fast, but more power hungry devices.

I don't see the usecase for UWB.

yes-and-no.

In my opinion, this was the timing and usefulness of Bluetooth in an era when only Nokia ruled the world. Moreover, there are many other reasons too.