Director at BigTechCo, when asked why that happens: "That's actually by design. We want internal competition. We can afford to spend 2 or 3x on building that product. We can't afford to have a competitor build it better."
And if you let these all go to market, you risk eroding user trust (think Google and messaging products). Confusing your users is not a good thing.
That said, the high level point is even without the M&A lever, these companies can still succeed by doing things that seem wasteful. FB is a good example with Snap. They didn't have the M&A lever (for different reasons in that case), but they just built Stories into Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. If you were willing to spend billions on M&A you can just spend them internally. And you don't even need to build a free-market best product, because you have a brand and user base that startups don't.
In any case, I do hope that alone isn't enough to keep big companies entrenched.
Also hi Scott!
People aren't stupid. If one team is simply failing to deliver, then the internal competition is a hedge on that.
Frankly I don't believe that an explicit ethos of internal competition is really what drives it. That might be how people at the top explain it, but it's really driven from the bottom up by dev teams who want to launch something in order to get promoted.
I mean, (just to show how confusing it is) I sorta thought Hangouts had already become Meet after they made Meet available to consumers. And it doesn't feel like Duo ever had much traction.