and OW is doing the same thing, by going down the path of having fewer members they basically are slowly becoming an alliance of airline groups...
expanding by purchasing other carriers or adding members that could purchase other carriers or will eventually merge into each other...

IAG- Finnair will likely join and Aer Lingus
AA
CX group- JL was happy to be sold off to CX during the crisis but CX has a stupid no investing out of China policy...
and the most effective at this for OW
LAN

in actual fact unless the alliance starts selling tickets directly on one site alliances will die and these groupings will be more important
LH group in star

they need to launch an airline called OW who will have their code on every OW flights all sold off the same website etc ( of course the airline will be virtual)