I see your point. One reason could be, that while there might be less stand-alone applications under development (just an assumption, I don't know whether it is

I see your point. One reason could be, that while there might be less stand-alone applications under development (just an assumption, I don't know whether it is so), nowadays lot of them are big apps required a lot of programmers (for example in the project I work on, there are several hundreds developers ;-). In the web apps world, the teams are usually slimmer.