I wonder if any major companies have experimented with an internal “red team” startup? It would be on level playing field with your upstart competitors, free from existing hierarchy and structure to develop disruptive tech like any other startup, only you are bankrolling them which gives them a head and shoulders boost relative to any other startup. Eventually you can let this startup grow to be more dominant than the old company and repeat the process with the next disruptive technology.
I've seen this in several mid-size companies but the trick to success is that you make a start-up in another vertical so your existing customers aren't dropping their contracts for the cheaper thing you disrupt yourself with. You're building a new business for the same market that already know you, so you can capitalize on your brand, using revenue from a dying but profitable model.
As a thought experiment, let's say Facebook did this.
The red team designs a new streamlined look with less click baity posts and fewer ads. Users flock to it, abandoning the existing platform. The new platform isn't monetized as effectively as the old one so revenue drops by billions per year - maybe an order of magnitude more than the new product brings in. Shareholders demand an answer as to what management are doing about it.
There might be some golden path, but that typically relies on finding a new market that doesn't interfere with the existing business (e.g. AWS and Amazon). However, the far easier options are a) shutdown the new service or b) increase its monetization, thereby starting the enshitification cycle.
