>>People will go to free solutions even if often inferior. It's very difficult to compete with free unless you're also free. And as Mike mentioned if you rely on income of that work that's just not going to work....

Agreed. Trouble is that if it's free or cheap then "good enough" is good enough for most people and many businesses. This principle has made Walmart rich and it's doing the same for Apple: they expect to make $6B from iStore this year, lets not forget Amazon Appstore that is only about 10% behind Apple on latest figures and even GooglePlay has a predicted $1.5-2B this year.

There are other winners too: check out http://www.freelancer.com where people in the third world are earning a fortune by local standards doing projects for a fraction of what we used to expect to pay. Can't comment on NET but check out some of the php/jquery projects. Some of these prices fell into the "too good to be true" category until quite recently but now, judging by feedback, this is a viable business choice.