Back in the day people explained the USSR's superior economic performance (according to the public data at the time) as being due to the USSR not wasting resources on competition like capitalist countries did.

If you assume the planner knows the right thing to do is that's actually a perfectly valid argument. It's actually pretty heartening to see the people leading Google don't believe this about themselves, though, because people who think that usually aren't correct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect

> It's just a waste of productivity. Not a strategy.

Whether or not its Google's actual strategy, multiple parallel development efforts with different profiles (e.g., risk, timeline, etc.) is certainly a strategy, and one recognized in many works on lean software development.

If something is important enough to your broader business strategy, not hedging by taking multiple approaches, while devoting resources that could be expended doing that on other, less critical, efforts, may be the real waste of productivity.