I dare you to name a good technology that came about due to a race of proprietary competition and not in close collaboration with the best talent in the field. It really is a waste to bin all this engineering talent apart just because their free backpacks have a different logo embroidered. You could have two engineers struggling with the exact same problem sitting in the same uber pool ride to work and they wouldn't be able to speak a word of it to each other due to shortsightedness by shareholders. There will be a point where a clear winner emerges, 5 competing companies turns to 3 and turns to 1, and all those hours and hours of engineering effort by the failures becomes a moot point. It's not like the 1 company that emerges will hire another 5 companies worth of engineering either, this is redundant work. You wouldn't even be able to learn from these failures until decades after the fact in a blog post from a retired engineer no longer bound to an NDA.