I think OP's point was less that the tech didn't work (e.g. OpenGL was fantastically successful) and that it didn't produce a good outcome for the "loser" companies that supported it.
And this strategy regularly works out for companies. It's Commoditize Your Complement.
If you're Intel you support Linux and other open source software so you can sell hardware that competes with vertically integrated vendors like DEC. This has gone very well for Intel -- proprietary RISC server architectures are basically dead, and Linux dominates much of the server market in which case they don't have to share their margins with Microsoft. The main survivor is IBM, which is another company that has embraced open standards. It might have also worked out for Sun but they failed to make competitive hardware, which is not optional.
We see this all over the place. Google's most successful "messaging service" is Gmail, using standard SMTP. It's rare to the point of notability for a modern internet service to use all proprietary networking protocols instead of standard HTTP and TCP and DNS, but many of them are extremely successful.
And some others are barely scraping by, but they exist, which they wouldn't if there wasn't a standard they could use instead of a proprietary system they were locked out of.
That is the point.
But FWIW the incumbent adopts it and dominates anyway. (Though you now are technically "untethered.")
That's assuming the incumbent's advantage isn't rooted in the lock-in.
If ML was suddenly untethered from CUDA, now you're competing on hardware. Intel would still have mediocre GPUs, but AMD's are competitive, and Intel's could be in the near future if they execute competently.
The open standard doesn't automatically give you the win, but it puts you in the ring.
And either of them have the potential to gain an advantage over Nvidia by integrating GPUs with their x86_64 CPUs, e.g. so the CPU and GPU can share memory, avoiding copying over PCIe and giving the CPU direct access to HBM. They could even put a cut down but compatible version of the technology in every commodity PC by default, giving them a huge installed base of hardware that encourages developers to target it.
Absolutely, SQL analytics people (like me) have been itching for a viable GPU for analytics for years now. The price/performance just isn't there yet because there's such a bias towards high compute and low memory.