Maybe it helps get government contracts
“We’re standards compliant”
“We’re standards compliant”
Other times, like with the "ISO power plug", the result was ISO/IEC 60906-1 which nobody uses. Swiss plugs (IEC Type J), which this plug is based on, use a slightly different distance for the ground pin, so it is incompatible. Brazil adopted it (IEC Type N) but made changes to pin diameter and current rating.
(It's still a trade-off, because standards also cost community time and effort.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Programming_Interf...
It didn't become one, but it did become standardised as ECMA-234:
https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...
>In February 1994, the PWI Specification Committee sent a draft specification to X/Open—who rejected it in March, after being threatened by Microsoft's assertion of intellectual property rights (IPR) over the Windows APIs
Looks like that's what it was.
If the choice is between an architecture owned, patented and managed by a single company domiciled in a foreign country, versus one which is an international standard and has multiple competing vendors, the latter suddenly seems a lot more attractive.
Price and performance don't matter that much. Governments are a lot less price-sensitive than consumers (and even businesses), they're willing to spend money to achieve their goals.