I think that they see blockchains as a way of organising consortiums of companies, but they can't think outside the hierarchic box so the consortiums are really de-facto central control over the corporations. It has big advantages especially in any application involving sharing data, like payment systems especially (the corps don't trust each other, of course).
But true horizontal systems scare the bejesus out of them. That's why they are selling their designs as being equivalent to cryptocurrencies. The reality is that they are just building a means of distributing their databases, not eliminating the hierarchy of control.