Rich Seifert (who worked on the original 10Mbit ethernet) in his "Gigabit Ethernet" book has some explanation about this.
Token Ring requires more complicated hardware, keeping the price higher. The higher price reduces demand, making it harder to reach the economy of scale point. There is a lot of hardware to manage tokens, create one if the active token is lost, etc. Also, TR has a priority system allowing eight priority levels. There is no system to manage or assign priority, so everyone uses the highest priority level, making the extra hardware useless. There is a story about a conference where IBM announced the TR card for the original IBM PC. Someone asked about ethernet, and the speaker suggested that if one found an ethernet card for less than $200, buy it. The next speaker was from 3com announcing the 3C501 for $199. (I believe I have the prices right, but it has been some time since I first heard this.) -- glen
