I was going to reply and say the same thing, but then I saw the parent. Just to expand (for the benefit of the GP):
The concept is called opportunity cost. Basically, the if you do A, but B would have made more money, B-A= the amount of money you lost doing A = opportunity cost.
This is, incidentally, the reason that competition in free market economies pounds out inefficiencies. If a person is efficient at programming computers but inefficient at fixing cars, then he can fix his car in less time by trading his programming for car fixing. For the mechanic, it is the other way around: he can easily earn enough in a couple of hours to pay the programmer to do what would take him days. Money is, in this sense, just a medium to facilitate this kind of exchange.
Companies work the same way. If Cisco were to open a business supplying flying cars, they could probably scratch a profit. But they lack the experience, knowledge and brand to do that efficiently. However, they are very good at networking equipment, and for the same money that it would take to make cars, they could just branch off of what they now into, say, subspace communication. Meanwhile, toyota, who already understands the fundamentals of how to build nice vehicles that people want to drive, can build the flying cars.