Thunderbolt, and Intel's "management" of that interface spec, is an excellent contrasting example of IEEE interfaces vs closed systems. I actively worked on a project building around TB2 (and then 3) for over two years and eventually we gave up on the entire thing due to the obscurity of the protocol, the absence of details of the Intel implementations (the only game in town at the time), and a myriad other roadblocks. By contrast I have some historical familiarity with Sony's Firewire iterations and once it became IEEE-1394 (and variants) it exploded in both popularity and transparency.

If Intel treated the original USB in the same way they do ThunderBolt, we'd still be using ADB, serial, parallel, and PS/2 interfaces on all our machines.