But it's an equilibrium, right? Lumifer's joke may be funny, but as an empirical matter, you don't see a lot of $20 bills lying on the ground. There's no easy pickings to be had in that manner. So the only people who can "outguess" the market (and I think that framing is seriously misleading, but let's put that aside for now) are individuals and organizations with hard-to-reproduce advantages in doing so - in the same way that Microsoft is profitable, but it doesn't follow that just anyone can make a profit through an arbitrage of buying developer time and selling software.
On the contrary, there are very many profitable software companies of all sizes. Writing software is a huge market that has grown very quickly and still provides large profit margins to many companies.
You might make an argument that Microsoft's real advantage is the customer lock-in they achieve through control of a huge installed base of software and files. Even there there are many software companies in the same position. It's hard to reproduce the advantage of having a large share of a large market. But that doesn't necessarily make it unprofitable to acquire even a small share of the market.
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: