The mobile app world is maturing and starting to unbundle itself. We've seen this recently with the Foursquare's introduction of Swarm, Facebook's unbundling of Messenger, and many more. Major tech companies are starting to build their own ecosystem of apps. Just look at the apps companies like Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Twitter, and even Salesforce are building—these companies are building entire ecosystems of specialized apps.

Fred Wilson described it back in May saying:

These app constellations are possibly the only sustainable answer to solving the distribution conundrum in mobile – how do I get around the app store leaderboard traffic jam? If you own a leading constellation, you can use your apps and your relationship with the users of those apps to promote and distribute new apps that you either build or buy. This promotion is “in situ” right on the mobile phone where the consumer’s attention is increasingly placed. I see this as yet another “rich get richer” dynamic in the mobile ecosystem.

I think this is really important for the future of the mobile ecosystem and technology. Some think, though, this is creating competition among their own business units. I would argue, though, this is where the future is headed and what businesses need to be doing. Let's look at this from Facebook's perspective.

Facebook's largest assets today are Facebook.com and the Facebook mobile app, which accounted for 66% of overall ad sales in Q3 2014. In the Boston Consulting Group's growth-share matrix, these would be considered cash cows. Facebook has a high market share and is squeezing every last ounce of profit out of these assets that are essentially in a low-growth market—Facebook only saw 2.27% user growth last quarter. They bring in the big bucks, though, that fund the "rising stars" and "question marks."

Its second largest assets are Instagram and WhatsApp. These are both currently rising stars, with high market growth and large relative market share. These businesses are growing at a massive pace, but have not grown large enough to currently make a dent in Facebook's revenue. Mark Zuckerberg said in their recent earnings call that his first priority was helping these assets reach mass scale and aggressively monetizing them.

And then there's the "question marks" or "investment properties." These are the big bets. This is where Messenger, the rumored "Moments" app, and Oculus find themselves. These are high-growth, low market share ventures. They sometimes are low-risk, but have the potential for huge gains. It's an investment into the future. And someday, one of these bets will pay off. Big. Facebook invests their resources, developers, and talent into these ventures.

This model may look to be "cannibalizing" itself, but Facebook and these other major companies building out app ecosystems (or "cloud" ecosystems) are doing exactly what any successful business should be doing—eating away their own market share instead of letting the market do it.

This strategy is how successful businesses plan for the future and grow a business at scale.