I'm sure you have seen the XKCD “Now there are 14 competing standards” comic. In programming circles, It is shared more than any other, as far as I can tell.

This does not actually happen much IRL, aside from purposeful vendor lock in.

What really happens is there are three standards, and two products that do their own thing.

Someone makes a new standard, and the two use it, plus one of the existing three becomes obsolete.

The libraries the open source crowd uses to support things just add the new standard, and support all four, forever; it's only 60kb of new code or so anyway.

Third party apps need very little extra work to support all of them. They just use the big all in one library.

Minimalist and proprietary/lock-in based apps continue only supporting one, as they always did, aside from things like Microsoft word, which supports everything.

Look at the vast number of media formats. Players just add em to the list, for a tiny extra cost in disk space, offset by the large savings in more efficient compression.

It doesn't even take that much maintenance, those decoders are written in C and can keep working, unchanged, for years(Although there may be security concerns with so much code, albeit slightly reduced if most of it never runs)

The only time this is an issue is when hardware support is needed. I suspect that will eventually go away as things get more reconfigurable.

Don't make useless new standards of the existing ones are good enough. But if a big company backs a new standard, it may well be the next big thing, and exist happily alongside the 5 other standards for years.