If I go to its Wikipedia page Blink is backed by many more companies than just Google. Where WebKit is or was basically Apple and some companies. Not dropping links because anyone can check wiki pages.
Those companies listed on Wikipedia are ones which have contributed over time, they are far from exhaustive and lack a lot of context.
WebKit itself was a fork of KHTML by Apple, and Blink was a fork of WebKit by Google. Both initially started with the one company and then had others contribute to the open source projects.
In the WebKit wiki it is noted that WebKit had 50% market share at its peak. This is when IE and Firefox still had about 15-20% market share each. WebKit was well on its way to being where Blink is today. It was used by Apple, Google, Palm, Sony, Nokia, Nintendo, and more.
It wasn’t the industry banding together to create Blink. It was Google. Then one by one, various companies gave up the fight, Microsoft and Opera are two of the most notable.
Maybe if Apple was easier to work with Blink wouldn’t have happened, but I probably had more to do with Google having their own view of what the web should be, and their own engine lets them push that on everyone.
