If you offer non-complementary products, the buyer may purchase anyway, but offering irrelevant products won’t turn that buyer into an avid fan. So, I think the concepts of trust and empathy have to be considered here.

When IBM became a service provider, it did something called opportunity management. The point was to eliminate channel conflict while selling its entire value chain to a customer regardless of who the functionality or service provider was.

When looking at asymetrical complementation, the long tails provides a useful visual. You have your platform, the hub, the 80percent of the Parento split, the hit, which happens to be stable over the life of a product. Then, you have the functionality built upon your platform, the last 20 percent of your intended scope. The long tails power law distribution reaches further towards infinity than other distributions, so beyond your 20 percent will be the market space where your complementors live.

When looking at symetrical complementation, you can thing of the product pairs as forces in relativistic physics. Each has a y-axis at opposite ends of an x-axis. Each provides functionality that translates to a height. Each has a power law distribution. These power law distributions intersect. The point where the intersect is just the balance point, the border surrounded by a borderland. Cross-selling happens in this boarderland.

When marketing your next discontinuous innovation, it won’t sell to your current market, so plan on it being an asymetrical complementation once the market phases synchronize. When the risk tolerance of the customer bases are similar, cross sell. You might cross sell your current product with its more pragmatic customers to your new early adopters while waiting for the customer bases to be come similar.