Personally I think it's great. Coordinating 57k people is very very hard. If you had to ask 57k people "Hey, I'm going to work on this, anyone else already doing something similar" the entire company would grind to a halt.

Sure there are mistakes but I don't think it's top down "team x" compete with "team y". It's more like both teams don't know about each other until the projects are far along. At which point might as well see which one does better... Or at least that seems to be the attitude at google.