Idea of cannibalizing your own Product/Service offering.

If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will - Steve Jobs.

This is business concept that Apple inherited early on in its products and service offerings. It a basic but scary concept that while comeing up with new offring to market, just canniblize your old offering with new & improved ones.

That way you will still be keeping the revenue & customers, instead of your competitors eating it away from you.

In business world this concept is not very-well adopted because of middle managment's self intrests. Now what happens usually is slightly tricky to understand lets take example of Kodak they had a business vertical which made camera-films, and there were very profitable in it. Turns out some internal team in Kodak made prototypes for a digital camera.

They shelved it too long in fear that this would disrupt the already well established ways of workings and market. Later sony innovated & launched digital cameras and Kodak's film-cameras became obsolete, had they cannibalised the film-camera them selves they would have enjoyed the growths from digital camera movement.

Some common resistances for cannibalising business offerings.

1. Desicision making bias - the legacy but profitable unit is reluctant to change things and usually have more say in decision making as they are currently making money. So any internal proposal to innovate and cannibalizd existing things in process is voted out. Only to be distrupted by other businesses in market.

2. Advisory on Cannibalizing existing solutions are not presented to C-Suit board.

3. This takes disruptions and realigment of team efforts away from what they are comfortable with doing.

Conculsion

There should be a balance in phasing-in new offerings and phasing-out old offerings.