Possibly nefarious stuff, but indications seem like it's mostly just a lot of internal competition, people unwittingly building doomed prototypes and such, like

Possibly nefarious stuff, but indications seem like it's mostly just a lot of internal competition, people unwittingly building doomed prototypes and such, like the famed "Acorn OS" that was a candidate to be iPhone OS but based on the iPod firmware rather than OS X.