To be more fair to them, it was just them and the "everyone" you're referring to was a result of a fantastic blatant + guerilla marketing campaign. Or maybe I should say a MEAN success? :)
It may seem like that from a certain perspective, but I remember drowning in the hype in 1992. It was going to be the next big thing: everything is going C++; you want objects; why would you store relational tables, when you want objects?; relational databases are just slow, clunky and complicate your code base. The company I was working at even tried it... very briefly :-) Unfortunately, I don't remember what we tried, but there were several around at the time. This stuff wasn't invented by MongoDB.
