Reminds me of the online travel industry. I did some time with Travelocity, Orbitz, and Expedia. Now its all Expedia. Expedia was always better, but not because they had a better product, but because they were better at finance and relationships. Travelocity had the best two products in the industry: travel packages and branded white labels.
I remember in each of these companies there were easily more than 10x product development people as marketing and merchandising people, but marketing people ran the companies. They had no idea about craftsmanship. Many of their ideas were in opposition to product quality would ultimately kill Travelocity as a slow poison.
My timing into all of this was interesting. I got into this in late 2007. At that exact moment Travelocity concluded industry growth in North America was finished. People had finally come online and organic growth was done. Now the only growth remaining was competition. Within a year all the executives left.
When Travelocity started its internal collapse in 2013 (I was in Afghanistan at the time) their superior products still had strong value even as the company quickly lost marketshare and employees. On top of that Travelocity had the strongest brand of the online travel companies, which was the thing they really wanted. In 2014 the company was diced up. Orbitz got the white label partnership business and Expedia got the Travelocity brand. In 2015 Expedia put in an offer to purchase Orbitz. A third of Orbitz's value was that partner business it got from Travelocity, because it would provide growth potential to Expedia it couldn't build from its brand alone. Now Travelocity is about a 50 person marketing team of Expedia, but it accounts for about a third of Expedia's core online revenue. At its high in 2012 Travelocity was about a 3500 employee company under Sabre.
The interesting thing about being at all 3 is the similarities in marketing driven goals and the similarities in technology. The technologies, the front end and the Java webapp middleware, were nearly identical. Same sorts of bloat. Same sorts of shifting positions on frameworks. Same sorts of aged archaic code that continued to live on 15 years later.
EDIT:
This is why the two products I mentioned were the industry's best. Vacation packages (flight + hotel + other things) by far had the highest margin. When you go to an online travel agency they are always pushing you to purchase a hotel, because hotels have substantially higher margin than flights, (like $50 compared to $7), but vacations packages could be worth anywhere from 1.5x to 4x hotel margin. Travelocity figured this out the best and were able to offer the cheapest packages at the highest margin rates. That was a big deal.
When all things retail fail, as they eventually always will, contracted partnerships will continue to pay. In additional to financial security they provide access to industries, data, and financial schemes otherwise not available. If you are a growth strategist this is what you want.