In this case, you guys are wrong. There was no planned malevolence, granted, a bit of ineptitude perhaps - but certainly no strategy to silence competitors to the traditional oil business.
possibly. They were however hedging their bets, and definitely used the solar side of the business as greenwash while they were investing hundreds times more in oil exploration in ever more difficult locations than they invested in their solar business.
However you look at it, they took a world leading solar brand and massively underinvested in it to the point that at the time when the world market has turned into a huge market worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year BP are closing it down.
Had they chosen to invest seriously in the business, using some of their vast oil profits to actually move the company 'beyond petroleum' rather than just using that as a PR strategy, then they could easily have been doing what the likes of suntech are doing now and pulling the solar revolution forward from the front, rather than paying lip service to that side of their business resulting in it beign closed down.
Looking at BP's track record though, you could be right about it simply being utter incompetence.
