To be fair, NetWare again was the product - microsoft didn't have anything worthy of respect until much later (and I can't remember if AD was any good in the early 2000s!)

NT4s Lanmanager was rubbish - NetWare was light years ahead as a directory service. I'd argue the institutions simply had the right tools for the job.

You are right about the hostile defaults / corpos getting into education to capture a generation, of course (and institutions want to be relevant to the market rather than to the principles or foundations, which is a shame)