Reminds me Stripe, the payment processor, who wrote a custom internal social media network: https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home It seems many tech companies have trouble de-engineering themselves and get stuck in a loop of endlessly rewriting/migrating/redesigning because they have a massive technical staff all trying to prove their value. Google definitely suffers from this. No glory in fixing the existing chat app, so just write a new one with new problems, justifying the creation of a newer one etc. Microsoft has it even worse because they can't delete any of the old interfaces for compatability reasons, so they just pile on layers of parallel systems.
Looks like that was the product of an internal hackathon. That said, your point is still valid; companies often experience these little internal pivots. In large companies, it becomes make-work empowering a Not Invented Here culture. In smaller companies, too much obsession over tangential projects lead to misprioritized boondoggles that might potentially threaten their futures.
