> It's baffling. If I'm a company, the idea of having more than one team doing the same thing in order to try to beat the other down strikes me as not just coun

> It's baffling. If I'm a company, the idea of having more than one team doing the same thing in order to try to beat the other down strikes me as not just counter-productive, but expensive and evidence of a broken hierarchy and culture. Depends... If you have the resources, multiple team can achieve the same result in many ways, one possibly being vastly superior than others. If you look at large companies like IBM or Oracle, this internal innovation is often stifled by "we have whale clients X Y and Z, ask them what they want and implement that". That said though, it can lead to duplication of efforts and pretty much the same result done twice (once for the finished product, and once for the almost finished product by team B). If you're apple with billions of dollars that you don't know what to do with, this is a viable and useful strategy (also employed by Amazon AFAIK).