It's possible.. they dropped their hugely incomplete Google Wave rotten egg on the public only a day before Microsoft announced MSN's Bing rebranding. Various project domains (waveprotocol.org) were only registered 2 weeks prior. Wave seemed like a weird and frivolous product until you look at it from this angle, at which point distraction seems like it could have been the only reason it was released.

There has been things in the past that indicate that large tech companies are somewhat aware of the big announcements before they happen. Look at Google & Amazon timing their cloud pricing announcements within 24 hours of each other, for example.