The best example of this sort of effort was the X Consortium, an alliance of 75 large and small companies who agreed to standardize graphics and imaging for workstations on the X Window System. In doing so, they made possible unparalleled opportunities for developing portable software on a wide spectrum of machines. These systems offered sophisticated analysis functionality for almost all of the popular machines used in astronomy. Once an analysis environment was chosen for a given project, buy-in was accomplished by mastering that environment and then tailoring the software design to exploit its strengths and evade its weaknesses. The most visible evidence of this change is the recent demise of the X Consortium.
Software is created, offered, and abandoned with startling rapidity.
It is little wonder that consortia cannot keep pace with this explosion of software. Their decline has given way to temporary alliances that exploit the latest technology offering. In such a fast-paced world, everyone is hedging their bets. It is becoming increasingly difficult to choose between software offerings whose longevity is questionable. It is even harder to invest time and effort in rapidly changing software.