I'm oversimplifying a bit here, but I think the strategy that most major software firms are following right now would match the "adaptive radiation" phase of ec

I'm oversimplifying a bit here, but I think the strategy that most major software firms are following right now would match the "adaptive radiation" phase of ecosystem evolution. There are so many empty niches as a result of the high dimensional space of user requirements (where say, 2 additional features are sufficient to differentiate a product, see e.g. discussions about slack vs discord vs teams from today) that companies hardly need directly compete with each other. This would be a virtuous explanation for lack of competition. Another candidate explanation for what is going on in your "race to the bottom" likely has to do more with signal to noise issues and other types of adverse selection where e.g. a company needs to spend only just enough money for a product to make it past the average review date, at which point the device/whatever will fail. These literally marginal devices/software/whatever are then sold by literally copying and pasting the specs from some other product that is selling well and now consumers are toast. In the software world this looks like a billion clones of the same game, etc. This however is not what I would call good faith competition, and in biological systems species that do this eventually get wiped away completely when they finish degrading the ecosystem they are in. This will look like a mobile gaming crash (about which there seem to be some google hits for back at the start of August). The kinds of things I'm thinking about are e.g. the fact that text selection in HTML documents is SO BAD that people have started to add copy buttons. Want to copy a url out of some calendaring software? OOPS NO you actually wanted to select literally all the other text on the page right? There are what 2.5ish major browser vendors (supposedly) now? That is by design and a sign of anticompetitive behavior. Another example would be the GTK+ file picker. Though in this case it is far more likely that the desktop linux environment is extremely marginal in terms of capital than anticompetitive behavior on the part of redhat.