With some of the recent announcements about the future of CodeIgniter and Expression Engine opinions have been coming out all over including this one from Elliot Haughin about a potential change in the Expression Engine market.

If you’re a CodeIgniter developer I would say this: You WILL be able to develop ExpressionEngine addons, plugins, as if you were just coding away in a CodeIgniter development. And this is where the 3rd party ExpressionEngine market will start going crazy.

He suggests that, while the EE development market has been largely dominate by a select few companies, that could be about to change. Any development group that's already familiar with the CodeIgniter framework will be able to jump right in and get in on writing EE add-ons and compete with those companies.

So, what do we get from the competition? Well, the first thing to happen is a shift in quality. New developers will attempt to 'out-class' the competition with more features, better designs, and generally higher quality products. Once quality reaches a saturation point, it becomes inefficient to compete on quality alone. Then we see a shift in price.