My gateway LT3103 sucks though.
like you're stating, sometimes it truly is the best solution to have multiple technologies in place, as long as they're smartly used. If not, you end up with a maintenance nightmare.
Amazon.com is a great success story and an example of using different technologies well, and it came about because they got their architecture correct. It started as a single C++ app talking to a backend, and that wasn't really going to scale well. I've heard that a single page on Amazong.com might talk to 100+ different services. In some places they use java servlets, in others they use Perl/Mason.
I've seen smaller companies with hybrid systems due to evolution or the top-down "we need to recode this but don't have a full budget." They tend to have real problems and the technology drags down the rest of the business. In a team of 5 people, it's hard to hire when you have 2-3 different technologies. When you're larger that's less of an issue, as you can have people devoted to an area of your software pile that is in the language or set of technologies they are good at.
When someone says "should" and talks about how things are "wrong" it usually leads to things sucking and ultimately being either more scarce or more expensive.
In the 70s the people of America via the US government said "gas SHOULD be cheap" and lo and behold it was so. And of course we ran out and had to ration.
In the 70s the people of America via the US government (sort of, it was really a private insurer with friends in high places) said "health care SHOULD be cheaper for people" and lo and behold the HMO act was created thus forcing employers to carry HMO options along side their other plans. And of course everyone thinks healthcare sucks here now (and it's more expensive than ever, but that's largely because the American people via Federal and State government say "these tests and these procedures SHOULD be covered for everyone no matter what, but that's a different story).
In the 90s and early 2000s the American people via the US government said "everyone SHOULD be able to have a house, that the mothertruckin' American Dream and we want people to stop dreaming about it and have it already" and wow holy crap look what happened there. House prices went up like crazy because of all the artificial/subsidized demand, we ran out of houses so we built shitloads of them so people could buy 2 and 3 and speculate, and pop goes the bubble and it's major suckage.
Everyone that thinks they know everything: please just stop saying SHOULD already and live in the world. Or just say it LESS.
Also, I don't think it's time to slow innovation in laptop batteries with standards yet. Cos like in 4 weeks someone might come out with a battery that uses different substances and requires (or can have) a different formfactor that could change the game, and it might have completely different voltage, charging, etc requirements and then what?
Microsoft invented AJAX. Just look what it's done for
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/10/69316 - paragraph 5.
(I developed a CMS back in 2000-2001 which required IE 5.5 and later 6 on the back end that made heavy use of pre-Ajax "ajax", so I happen to share Wired's view. In 2006 or so it was changed to use the new ajax "Standards" (which appeared in 2005) and that was great because for some reason Microsoft's solution required Java on the client and they were required to stop shipping Java etc etc...)
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.