It was. Several times. It was developed by a lot of large companies too. Nobody remember those, for obvious reasons, but people used to use them.
Even Berkeley didn't get it at first. Early Berkeley TCP/IP only talked to other Berkeley TCP/IP systems. They had to be beaten on to get interoperability to work. 4.3BSD shipped with broken sequence number arithmetic that only talked to itself until we fixed that.
This was back when big buyers had more clout than software vendors. It's hard to do that today.
Your example may be a bit too old. Even novell netware, token ring etc won't ring a bell to many people.
Try a simpler one instead: Do you guys remember about the various wireless standards before Wifi?
The Orinocos and the Intel 2011 PCMCIA were IIRC among the first ones of the 802.11b - quickly eclipsing everything else.
Also, what about DECT from about the same period? Some companies (mostly in Europe) tried to make an equivalent of Wifi, but using DECT modems. Some devices even made it to the market!
Eventually, somethings dominate whether it comes from a standard body or is "branded" as a standard ex-post.
Well, at least on this case government research did produce the best outcome. By far. So far no comparison even makes sense, and people don't even remember there were other attempts.
Color me impressed!