In those days, there was no single dominant phone or chipset manufacturer in most countries, much less globally. The phone was a device to access your carrier's plan, maybe with a few nice goodies on the side. Which plan you had was much more important than which phone you had. Phones were like cable boxes in many ways, most people don't know who makes their cable box, all they care about is whether they can watch ESPN and for how much.
Nowadays, you have three OSes that really matter, iOS, Android and Windows on the desktop side. Most people will only ever use at most two. You don't quite need a standard as much in an environment like that.
> You don't quite need a standard as much in an environment like that.
Who is "You" in that context?
[Large developer of a product]: You DON'T need a standard because you can strongarm your proprietary implementation into "your" standard (which is what is happening, as I wrote above), and as long as the user only buys products sanctioned by you, all is fine.
[Small developer of a product]: You DO need a standard because you are only able to participate and compete if you are able to match the experience of the large players in your market (which might also be the ones owning the platform your product connects to). For this you need equal access to those proprietary standards they may have created. This is however not in the interest of most of the large players, so you are actually not able to compete on equal grounds.
[Product consumer]: You actually WANT a standard, because a standard ensures interoperability across different types of products and vendors, and prevents vendor/ecosystem lock-in.
In these "different times", this fair and competitive market was a side-effect from this need for vendors to align in order to standardize across different areas, because they understood that "they cannot do this alone".
In the "nowadays times", there is a handful of companies large enough to do it alone, and they have an active interest to prevent the creation of an industry standard ("I want to enter the watch market, so I create a standard to connect my platform to a watch, AND I create a watch to control this value-chain end-to-end).
This "side-effect" of a competitive market is now gone and is ACTIVELY prevented by this handful of companies (see adoption and proprietary expansion/restriction of Bluetooth, WiFi-Direct, NFC,...)
In those days, there was no single dominant phone or chipset manufacturer in most countries, much less globally. The phone was a device to access your carrier's plan, maybe with a few nice goodies on the side. Which plan you had was much more important than which phone you had. Phones were like cable boxes in many ways, most people don't know who makes their cable box, all they care about is whether they can watch ESPN and for how much.
Nowadays, you have three OSes that really matter, iOS, Android and Windows on the desktop side. Most people will only ever use at most two. You don't quite need a standard as much in an environment like that.