In an ideal world we would be all using open standards protocols/file formats/etc which would avoid this mess however in reality what ends up happening is a replay of the XKCD comic about standards - every vendor insisting that after embracing an open standard that they have some unique corner case that requires them to diverge from the standard rather than work within the system which starts off as divergence then leads to a completely new standard. The committee process is pretty horrendous as well as demonstrated by how long it took took to standardise HTML5 and the various organisations who were members either throwing around their patents or threatening to block any movement forward.