[skybrian]

This is a special case of the general trend that increasing quality is a barrier to entry. Even with a bit of competition, it's just harder to compete as complexity goes up and users have higher expectations. For example see the top-selling movies or games.

Open source code somewhat mitigates this: Apple forked KHTML, then Google forked WebKit, and now Microsoft is building on and may someday fork Chromium. But it remains the case that some projects are very hard to do from scratch with professional quality, and even maintaining a fork requires a lot of expertise.

Also, sometimes you can reverse the aesthetic so that some people prefer stuff that's not professional quality, so you get an "indy" market.