Granted, early versions of IE made a hash of the standards that did exist, and didn't place an emphasis on compliance.
But the more accurate phrasing would be "W3C wasn't prepared for web adoption, and wasn't as agile as the early web needed."
People forget we wouldn't have gotten AJAX and descendents without IE's non-standard XMLHttpRequest support.
Granted, early versions of IE made a hash of the standards that did exist, and didn't place an emphasis on compliance.
But the more accurate phrasing would be "W3C wasn't prepared for web adoption, and wasn't as agile as the early web needed."
People forget we wouldn't have gotten AJAX and descendents without IE's non-standard XMLHttpRequest support.