My 2c, not speaking as a Google rep but as myself, is that if you have a problem only a single actor needs to solve, you're going to end up with software, not a standard. To get a standard, you have to have a situation where the value of cooperation is higher than the cost.

There are plenty of people now who need to solve the container problem, but Googlers been working on this shit for years, before it was really on anyone else's horizon. Google employees incepted the cgroup feature way back in 2006, to solve problems that were already being felt acutely at that time within Google. Folks have been working on this stuff a long time before it mattered to anyone else, and that's why what's coming out is software rather than standards. There is no way a big company is going to delay solutions to an urgent strategic problem in order to be part of a democratic process for the sake of a few people's ideals. Maybe if they'd seen it coming five or ten years in advance, to give enough time for the standardization process to occur, but Google was far too small and the future far too uncertain in 2001 to predict what might be needed in 2006.