Total Solution in Business: A Boon or a Bane?

Two Chief Innovation Officers (CIOs) had a debate and few excerpts are as follows: Chief Innovation Officer (testA): "If we look at the cases of Whirlpool's Sensigerator, Magnavox TVs, RIM's Blackberry, Philips' Teakettle, Intuit's Quicken, Sony's e-reader, VoIP of Vonage and Microsoft's Office, we can conclude that 'total solution' is not only instrumental but also indispensable in making novel products cross the chasm. After all, no sane customer wants to buy partial solutions, right?" Chief Innovation Officer (testB): "I disagree with what you say in view of several counter-examples like Metaphor and LiveWorks, the spin-offs of Xerox Technology Ventures and VoIP of Skype. In fact, we need to observe a caveat that the concept of total solution itself is fuzzy and it would be too premature to arrive at conclusions without being clear about it. The notion of 'total solution' varies in its interpretation from one market geography to another and hence it is non-universal in its connotation. Moreover, its definition changes from time to time and from one customer segment to another. In such a scenario, the managerial stand in this context is subject to a serious dilemma. After all, no pragmatic customer wants to buy complete solutions, right?"

What is your take on this? Justify and demystify your stand with due support from pertinent xizzler benchmarks, if any. Substantiate your argument with related concepts and relevant business stories of success and failure from the predecessor / contemporary firms.