This "conspiracy theory" has been around for long enough, and was discussed by Joel in 2002 in his "Fire and Motion"'article:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

The idea that big companies keep throwing out new technologies to keep little companies churning, even if it didn't exist when Joel wrote about it, could have been adopted after. Of course, some of his calls were wrong in that article, but that's a different discussion.