You are conflating technical and financial power. If your company has bleeding edge technology, and the only thing you want is to see it widely adapted, open so

You are conflating technical and financial power. If your company has bleeding edge technology, and the only thing you want is to see it widely adapted, open source or freely license all your software, so a large number of small companies can build things using it. But (my guess is, I don't know what company this is) you won't do so because you want to leverage the financial power of that knowledge. In that case, why begrudge the Google researchers their 300k? An example of a truly distributed purely technical power group would be something like Debian GNU/Linux. One of the reasons it's possible, and getting easier by the day to run desktop software that isn't locked down by one of the big corporations is the existence of distributed projects like the kernel and Debian.