“The whole ordeal took months to complete, and I’m guessing that all things considered, it cost the small company of ~6 people about half a year of development time.”
A new COO feared someone would steal the code, so a six-person startup moved everything to a server in a closet. The code was broken half the time and undocumented. Google would rather rebuild it than read it. The value was in the heads of the people who wrote it. Management spent half a year guarding the wrong asset.