Having lurked around in the edges of various standardization processes for 20+ years I don't think this is a problem that gets fixed by money.

You can spend an enormous amount of money building out a standard like SOAP which might then turn out not to have nearly as much long-running as the specification authors expected.

That’s totally fair. Money though is a representation of desire and the reality is people don’t have interest in solving these problems. We live in a society where there’s much more interest in creating something that might be god than solving other problems. And that’s really the main point of the article.

But also even if the W3C spent $10m a year for the 10 years SOAP was being actively developed according to Wikipedia that would still be 1/1000 of the 100billion we’re talking about. So we really have no idea what this sort of money could do if mobilized in other ways.