IBM is the archetypical company of the idea of good products being discarded because they could hurt sales of other products. This, of course, comes from the fact that IBM is so large that there's hardly a product that they could possibly add to their product lines that wouldn't in some way hurt sales of another product.
Unfortunately, when you combine this problem with the company being absolutely enormous and hence having both significant bureaucracy and significantly powerful people that may oppose one another, technical considerations pale in importance in comparison with political considerations.