When a company is large, the profit centers are lower, at divisions rather than the whole thing. Executives above the divisions don’t dare risk destroying one product line with another, so even when inventing the innovations necessary, they don’t market them because of the risk to the current cash cow.
The most famous case of this is Xerox PARC, of course: they invented the paperless office, but couldn’t sell it because it (theoretically) would have destroyed their copier/toner cash cow.
Other famous ones include IBM’s disabling of the 286 chip, and under-powering the 386 in their PS2s, in an effort not to compete with their low-end workstation and AS/400 market. They quickly got left behind by Compaq who put out 386 boxes at their fullest potential and their PC business never really recovered.
