My dad once told me (in a business context; otherwise this would sound kind of weird): "If you're going to get destroyed, you want to own the means of your own destruction." It makes sense to me, but maybe that's easy to say as a student and hard to say as an executive with shareholders.
I suspect that the shareholders, by and large, are pretty happy with the "owning" part; I am guessing that it's your Senior Vice President of Polaroid for Organic Chemistry Research you have to worry about.
It's easy to say as an executive too. Just hard to do. Any music exec will tell you "We need to own music distribution on the internet." But it's hard for an organization to actually work on two goals at once when those goals are
1. Crush the new business model
2. Make the new business model your own
You have different parts of the same company working against each other, and that either poisons the environment or everyone ends up favoring one side over the other.
