This post doesn't make any sense. The people who define the OpenGL spec include delegates from ATI, Creative Labs, Intel, and Nvidia. Khronos doesn't go out and engage the vendors? They're a consortium of the vendors you claim they don't engage.

The reason for the core OpenGL spec lagging with consumer level graphics stuff is largely due to its incredible breadth of applications and target platforms. With OpenGL 3.0 there was a lot of contention between the people who wanted to turn it into a streamlined real time gaming API, and the people who used it for other industries where a lot of features not supported on gaming hardware were still useful for non-gaming applications. It started with a very ambitious revamping proposal, followed by months of (rather aggrivating) total silence, then culminated with the deprecation model that's currently in place.

OpenGL's problems don't have anything to do with Direct3D being more in the loop than they are about new hardware developments. It's inherently more challenging to keep pace and be flexible because they're maintaining a broad spec used by a lot of different companies in a lot of different specialized fields. As far as feature deployment is concerned, on more than one occasion Nvidia has had drivers out on the same day Khronos releases a new spec. Current desktop OpenGL is quite a nice, modern API that's suitable for cutting edge game development. The new deprecation model allows driver authors to create profiles optimized for specific classes of applications (of which there are many where OpenGL is useful). On Windows, libraries like GLEW make Microsoft's decision to not move the ABI forward a non-issue. OpenGL ES is very much a modern API that's useful across a wide variety of in-demand mobile platforms. The way modern GL handles things like VBOs and render to texture are at least as good as Direct3D.

I'm not advocating the use of OpenGL over D3D or vice versa. Right now I primarily do Android and web development stuff, so I'm kind of saturated in OpenGL-centric environments. I just felt the need to respond to that weird claim that Khronos is disengaged from hardware vendors. Khronos largely ARE hardware vendors.

Sincerely,
MS Fanboy with an Xbox 360, XNA Creators Club subscription, and a deep love for Visual Studio and C# who uses Bing search (and doesn't think IE9 is absolutely terrible)