Nick, I'm a little slow on the uptake today (as always) and I don't understand your point. Can you elucidate?
Sure. Let's put it in Microsoft terms. Suppose the day comes when Microsoft realizes that they are leaving money on the table by refusing to sell SQL Server on linux. All the high-end linux database business is going to Oracle or DB/2.
So the SQL Server team gets the green light to produce a linux version. Let's say that in early testing, it becomes clear that the linux version of SQL Server will beat the Windows version of SQL Server in benchmarks. This is when the moment of truth arrives. Is the SQL Server team allowed to go to market with a product that will win business for itself against Oracle and DB/2, at the expense of making a sister product look bad?
Different companies have different philosophies about this. In the old days at IBM, they wouldn't have let that product out the door until the OS/390 version ran faster, even if that meant crippling the linux version. I suspect the same thing would occur in Microsoft today.
Once you get to a certain size, a strategy of trying to maintain advantage with a "total package" offering becomes very difficult to execute. There are always going to be point-product specialists out there who have better offerings for a specific task than the "total package" guy. Oracle is such a vendor. IBM apparently has the cat's meow of web application servers in Web Sphere (which will not stop some clown from coming in here to say it sucks... but it is clearly doing well out in the market, as is Oracle).
The point is, there are natural limits to the growth one can expect as a "total package" vendor. There is a segment that wants that, and they will become "Microsoft shops" or "IBM shops," but they are only a fraction of the market. To get beyond them, you have to be able to beat the point-product guys in their specialties... and that is tough. You can't do that and tailor your point product to your other offerings. You have to be willing to go pedal-to-the-metal to make your point product shine on some other guy's platform. That's not a technical problem so much as it is a corporate-culture problem. Microsoft is nowhere near that kind of culture today.