The monolithic kitchen sink has won, because the OS bundled libraries have different APIs (not only among different OSes, but also among different versions - an

The monolithic kitchen sink has won, because the OS bundled libraries have different APIs (not only among different OSes, but also among different versions - and OS vendors are interested in pushing the latest), so app vendors just said to themselves "screw it" and bundled library (like jpeglib or libpng) that has same API on all systems and versioning is under their control. That's the short version ;).