Technology

The short of it is that the standardization and OSS of the 90s was an anomaly, allowed by commercial interests taking their eye off the ball at a critical time. The challenges are that those commercial interests have the hang of things now and for new developments are all over making sure things develop in a way more consistent with their strategies.

For example, if AOL back in the day had made 'campus edition', then we might never have seen a federated internet, with AOL providing the "modern" connectivity and communications features before Mosaic could spawn Netscape and spell the end of AOL's strategy, which was miles friendlier than NNTP, Gopher, IRC, and various BBSes of the time. All those ultimately fell to the browser in one way or another, but AOL could have easily beaten the federated answer to the punch, except they neglected academic, government, and business market.

Same for Linux, it was enabled by the Unix vendors neglecting the user experience and also the opportunity opened up by the PC clone ecosystem. If people weren't already replacing most of the user-facing stuff in their Solaris workstation with open source stuff, they might not have had such an easy time going to Linux on much more affordable hardware. If Sun had done Solaris PC edition with something more competitive with KDE, bash, and all the utilities, then Linux might not have been "worth it".

So in the 90s, they let their guard down and a federated internet happened with lots of open source viable all over the stack. With the massive investment since, that facet has been "contained" to the places where it's pretty much unassailable now, but the evolution and growth of that mindset is firmly throttled by the business interests.