Good observation. A few of my previous employers simply stopped hiring in house developers. They feel more comfortable relying on either outside vendors or off the shelf software. One reason is the lack of available talent to come in and support legacy in-house software. Maybe that trend will reverse or slow a bit. So much of the off the shelf software is overpriced and inflexible.
Also, "off the shelf" often comes to mean "a proprietary, poorly documented and clunky framework or programming language, disguised as an application".
