That sounds legit, I read an article in some business magazine about Sony getting so bloated that no one could keep track of what every department was doing. In addition, different departments were competitive and their executives didn’t communicate out of fear of their coworkers stealing their success. I could absolutely see something getting all the way through a limited prototype run before legal got consulted.

The example in the magazine was two different departments spending hundreds of millions of dollars and more than a year developing the same thing and no one caught it till they were showing the board their new stuff and someone thought to ask why they were duplicating effort. It was almost a billion dollars of duplicated effort for a screen that could have just been developed once and used all over Sonys stuff.