Comment by hinkley

This sort of Regulatory Capture is quite old in the software field. People were already noticing it in the 90's.

Making a spec that contains a venn diagram of most of the features each of the signatories to the specification have implemented themselves ends up pulling the ladder up behind them. Each non-academic committee member discovers they're already more than 75% of the way to having completed the spec and any junior members or amateurs have years of work to do in order to catch up to Now. If any upstarts threaten to get within striking distance of an implementation you can always convene the committee again and discuss version 2 of the spec.

Mobile devices tamped this down just a little bit but mostly they lowered the slope of the line a hair and changed where the focus was a bit.