Not many other companies have the unique blend of being out of touch enough to think that anyone knows what this means and reality, and self-important enough to think that people care.
Are you anthropomorphising companies now? Google the company can't be "out of touch" or "self-important". The engineers maybe, but they don't make PR decisions like this.
In this case the original source is an announcement on a "inside-google" blog, and starts with "Hi Googlers", so the target are clearly mostly Google engineers. It ended up on HN because it was repeated by arstechnica, a respected and well-known portal. And here we are discussing it. So maybe people in fact do care about this?
Companies are groups of people, they're maintained by people, all their decisions are made by people and they only ever do things through their people's hands. They are as anthropomorphic as it gets.
I don't necessarily disagree, but structurally these moves can be very impactful, particularly in a huge company as sprawling and with as much overlap as Google.
If there's a lot of redundant work being done, maybe the teams will benefit from working together on the same problems.
You're right that most of us don't care, necessarily, but I think it sends some signals that the company is attempting to focus a bunch of less focused lasers at the same point.
It's less common in tech companies than in massive multinationals like GE or Sony that span a lot of different industries.
