Sorry, but this is wrong. Dead wrong.

I also think that standardization wasn't an unmitigated positive because it solidified and made rigid 20 years worth of crufty, work-in-progress system software and didn't allow for any forward progress for cleaning up the mess. GNU helped a lot but only now are we going back and re-thinking the system from the beginning and making it super awesome. Plan9 did much of the same work but failed because it wasn't a gradual, in-place migration path.