Companies don't work as hard as they can when they know that they're slightly beating their competitors (and the converse)

I'm afraid I didn't keep information about the citation, but when I was reading up on chip fabs for my essay I ran into a long article claiming that there is a very strong profit motive for companies to stack themselves into an order from most expensive & cutting-edge to cheapest & most obsolete, and that the leading firm can generally produce better or cheaper but this 'uses up' R&D and they want to dribble it out as slowly as possible to extract maximal consumer surplus.