As we all may have heard, "the devil is in the details", and your analogy about IBM is not all that detail correct.
The ISA bus in PC computers (which is now obsolete, because it was an 8 bit and later expanded into a 16 bit) was the spec that IBM allowed to be "released into the wild" after IBM had moved to the "microchannel" bus which was indeed propitiatory to IBM PCs and was a 16 bit (later 32bit) bus.
It was the failure to follow the rest of the industry into EISA, and an attempt to "force" the market to use only IBM add in components on IBM PC computers that allowed Compaq and others to gain the market share that was taken away from IBM.
Almost none of the loss IBM's market had very much to do with the technical end of this, as this was primarily of importance to really geeky people (like the kind of folks that like to know all about electric powered forklift controls) and people playing games on their PCs (who were the ones wanting to upgrade whatever computer they had so they could play the next great game, something I also call "big hard drive envy" :-) ).
IBM lost market share because of marketing (advertising) and [mainly] pricing.
I am a very big advocate for "open standards" which is what I think we are leading this discussion towards clarifying what it is we are wishing for, and we already have considerable "open standards" and even a "standards body" (the industrial truck standards development foundation= ITSDF, can be found at itsdf.org).
Perhaps a real answer would be to petition iITSDF to push for an OBD2-E (or OBD4-E) inclusion in the next update of b56.1.
I would personally like to see it be a wireless IPV6 ieee802.11n compatible standard myself, and I bet that a bunch of people in the "supply chain management" and "fleet management" [in other words; the end users of newer machines] IT functions might think the capabilities included in such a standard would make who ever adopts it very attractive selling point.
The biggest problem I foresee with that is that it makes it only a 1/2 baby step towards not requiring operators, (and where would -we- be without damaged forklifts) and about 1/4 baby step towards not requiring any sort of diagnostic ability to fix forklifts. Next up, automatic oil changes and lubrication that only requires insertion of a grease tube into a holder 1 time a year.