This applies to much more than polish

The metaphor the US military uses is "burning more calories" and it is absolutely a tactic which is effective in a variety of theaters. If you have more resources, then you try as much as possible to shift the fight into axes that require more resources. Even if you have to spend 4x as much, if you have 10x as much to spend (which corporations do compared to communities), then it's Winning. For example: from the outside, it sure looks like a lot of Google-backed Web Standards exist solely to give Mozilla lots of busy work. The more resources they have to invest making Firefox following Google's goals, the less they have leftover to follow Mozilla's goals. Which considering Mozilla's recent mismanagement probably isn't so necessary anymore, but like... between Dart, and Native Client, and The Image Format Which Shall Not Be Named, they were trying to a browser inviable unless its dev team had a quadruple-figure headcount. Thank goodness NaCl and Dart got righteously dunked on by asm.js and TypeScript, respectively. For a view from the inside, see "Fire and Motion" (2002) by Joel Spolsky. Description of how Microsoft intentionally-ish keeps its Windows API treadmill going fast fast fast so that everyone else tires themselves out trying to keep up. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/]