Here's an example close to my heart (and please note that I'm just a cog and this is not a statement on official strategy -- just my personal observation): In Google Chrome, we decided to do native beautiful polished UI on every platform - Windows, OS X, iOS, Android -- even Linux!! This is a very expensive way to build a piece of client-side software, and some might say the result is only a few percent better than what could be achieved using a cross-platform UI toolkit. But it's a very expensive couple percent to duplicate.

Same thing with multiprocess. Only makes the software a little bit better, but again, extremely difficult to replicate.

If you look closely, I believe you will see this strategy being used by the leaders of many industries that would at first glance appear to have low barriers to entry.