Nothing to do with infighting and lack of standards across distributions.
Any of the Unix versions could have become windows.
This is all about economics.
A SCO Linux license cost something like 10x of windows 3.1 and was horrendously slow at the hw you had at the time.
Windows 3.1 may have been a stability joke, but it ran reasonably fast.
Similarly with word processors, framemaker, the leading Unix running world alternative cost 1200 usd in 1998 (from a price list I found with some quick googling) while the entire office suite at the time was 499.
Similarly with the HW, everything Unix was priced at a level that was simply out of reach for most people.
Linux and bsd on x386 was considered free toys for special interested people and without viable spreadsheet and text processing software (I know, there is latex and I have used it a lot myself, cut it is not an alternative for the masses), Linux and *BSD was not alternatives for the masses.
Really very simple. The commercial Unix guys thought msdos and windows was just toys. They thought they had some exclusive that could be priced like a Prada handbag or something. However,, the volume products almost always wins in the end and thatâ(TM)s what really happened.