[mikekchar]

Having done a fairly long stint in the telephony world, I can say that the general purpose of standards committees is to rush through a whole bunch of hacky changes on your platform and then strong arm everyone else to implement what you did -- the more work they have to do the better; the worse it fits into their original ecosystem the better. Your goal is to make your competition perpetually play catch up and to have a slightly wonkier version of your system.

People in large organisations take this stuff very seriously and it can be difficult for other people to concentrate on making a good spec that will work well for everybody. The idea is that the market is pretty much the same size whether you have a fantastic application or a hacked together application. What matters for the company is what percentage of the market share you have. It's worth a considerable amount of fit-for-purpose in order to lock in eternal advantage over your competition.