Comment by p_l

A lot of the IETF standards winning was vendors avoiding work even when paid for.

Another was NIH in considerable important places.

Yet another was that ITU standards promoted use of compilers generating serialization code from schema, and that required having that compiler. One common issue I found out from trying to rescue some old Unix OSI code was that the most popular option in use at many universities was apparently total crap.

In comparison, you could plop a grad student with telnet to experiment with SMTP. Nobody cared that it was shitty, because it was not supposed to be used long. And then nobody wanted to invest in better.