I'll tell you what happened: The industry matured. In the 80s, 90s, hell even the mid 2000s, if you had a great product you could likely get business because simply, you had a great product! Tons of industries were being transformed, disrupted, and shaped by new firms all the time. Famously, Adobe was profitable within its first year of operation thanks to a nice deal with Apple to use postscript (bit of history here:
https://www.prepressure.com/postscript/basics/history and here
http://appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/14/adobe_apple_war_on... )
Its unlikely the then young Adobe would have needed to do much if at all any marketing to get companies behind PostScript, because it was ahead of any other solution of its time. Many people welcomed it with open arms, and it became the de-facto standard quickly at the time.
Adobe just built a superior product. And then they all showed up to get some.
You can say the same of Netscape in the 90s before Internet Explorer, you could say the same of MySpace in the early 200s as the superior social network to what came before it. (Of course, this is before FaceBook, which through targeted marketing at first to college kids, proved to usher in a different era, on many fronts, in 2006). There are other numerous examples.
Fast forward to post Web 2.0 hay-fever of the mid 2000s into the Gold Rush stage of the App Economy, by 2010, there was a clear shift. Apple & Google consolidated on mobile. The Desktop, a traditional stalwart of Microsoft, began its small but inevitable decline of mindshare (and eventually, real dollars) in the minds of consumers and businesses alike. Web apps made the desktop OS less relevant (but not irrelevant, mind you). The field became crowded. Quality wasn't the only measure of success anymore. The economy of software shifted, in large part due to the internets inherent reliance on gaining users first for services (like FaceBook, which at one point was being hailed as the 'the gaming future' https://www.forbes.com/2010/02/27/videogames-farmville-zynga..., see these other anecdotes as well: http://www.adweek.com/digital/future-social-gaming-facebook/, https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/02/big-names-tiny-games-... notice that FaceBook rarely charged a dime for any of its endeavors. The same happened in email, and other services)
What become clear as these platforms began to take assertive positions in the market place is that it no longer became about just quality. The quality, or I should say the minimum viable quality, became easy to achieve. Xcode, through quite a few iterations, made it easy to go with default values that make most apps look and feel relatively native. You didn't have to be the best coder to have a slick working app and publish to the app store. The 'quality' of the product increased its minimum bar substantially. iOS 7, for all it garnered, enforced a design paradigm that adapted easily to most apps by default. Google with Android is achieving this, albeit more slowly, with Material as well.
Not mention toolkits published by Unity, FaceBook has their own frameworks as well for publishing things to their platform (not so much games anymore, as much as now becoming a strong aggregator of media), and much more. This isn't to say anyone can code and put out a great app, there is still some skill required. It is to say that it takes much less to build that quality product.
So today, in 2017, it is unfair and quite naive, I think, in this world we have, to broadly state, 'build it and they will come' makes any sense. Because you can build the next great thing. And nobody will come. You can build something that is so compelling that anyone aware of its existence would be a fool not to adopt it, and it can still fail. Why? because you are no longer competing on 'quality' as much as exposure, marketing, and mindshare. Is quality a component? You bet. I am not arguing for a lack or disregard for quality. Its very important. Now, however, you are competing for the funnel. The eyes of those you seek to reach. We find ourselves in the same situation car companies did years ago. Where generally speaking, all cars built today, are about as reliable as each other, broadly speaking. Instead, they duke it out on the fringes (performance cars, electric cars, until perhaps recently, hybrid cars) or for mindshare and price.
Price. You see, price as a side of effect of this, for software, has effectively been driven to zero for most markets, broadly speaking. Advertising is the only quick way most companies, I believe, have found any way to monetize their product at all. If you consider the age we are in, its remarkable people want to build software that relies on any sales at all. The rise of subscription software is no accident. Even Enterprise software has been upended by the free or freemium models. One of the larger HVAC businesses in my area of living, for example, still uses their @gmail.com for email because thats what they started with 10 years ago (roughly, i think thats about how long they been around). Why pay for email when you don't have to? SquareSpace, Wix, Blogger, Wordpress, and the like, have also decimated the once flourishing cottage industry of catering to small and medium business owners to get a web presence.
That, in 2017, is the state of the markets of software. Especially consumer software. Now is the time of infinite quality (from the very best to minimally viable, but viable enough to be considered quality @ that specified 'bracket' or 'demeanor'). Quality, itself, is no longer the only reason people use a product.