To be perfectly honest I don’t know the answer to the chat app case in particular. That’s possible, and if one were to investigate and find each app was made by

To be perfectly honest I don’t know the answer to the chat app case in particular. That’s possible, and if one were to investigate and find each app was made by a team rolling up into a different director then I’d say that’s what happened. However it’s entirely possible that it was caused by an overly complex market segmentation strategy. WhatsApp had the advantage of growing slowly and segmenting their users with time to experiment and tweak things. The Google chat apps came out at once, and it’s possible there were so many because they tried to come up with a working segmentation for all addressable users from day one instead of growing organically and grabbing each segment one at a time.