Standards para quê?

Estava a ler alguma documentação sobre Ajax quando reparei no seguinte parágrafo, proferido por Todd Anglin da Telerik:

"At the heart of Ajax is the ability to communicate with a web server asynchronously without taking away the user’s ability to interact with the page. The XMLHttpRequest is what makes this possible. This technology was created by Microsoft as an IE ActiveX control to support their (then) groundbreaking Outlook Web Access, but it has since been built-in natively to all modern web browsers (including IE7). In fact, if Mozilla had not had a rare “Microsoft moment” and decided not to add support for the nonstandard XMLHttpRequest to their Firefox browser, it is doubtful that Ajax would be nearly as popular as it is today."

Conclusão: há sempre alguém que se julga acima do que já está feito e tenta fazer sempre as coisas à sua maneira, não são assim estabelecidos standards e os programadores que querem utilizar a tecnologia são obrigados a fazer código horrivelmente feio, para assim suportarem as diferentes implementações.