The way Erlich greeted the Japanese gardener earlier in the episode and how the final scene starts with a shot on the gardener makes me think this is all a part of the plan.
Maybe the skunkworks plan is still on, along with another, more sophisticated and effective plan.
If Richard and Co. simply go behind Jack Barker's back and develop all of the other platforms, it does not solve their problem; it actually makes it more difficult. Barker needs to be removed completely from the company for Richard, Jared, Gilfoyle, and Dinesh to regain control and developing a bunch of unwanted features behind Barker's back does not remove him from Pied Piper.
Barker will be praised for following Raviga's wishes for Pied Piper's future, and he'll get critical acclaim from the industry for Richard's work. There's no way Raviga would fire him.
But.....
If Jack stumbled on their skunkworks plan through Richard's slip by an oddly placed hose manned by the gardener then he would have to fire Richard. From Raviga's perspective, that would depict chaos, which according to Monica was the reason they wouldn't fire Jack in the first place. However, in this situation it would be chaos caused by Jack, not Raviga.
So, in this environment, Jack Barker would ignore Raviga's long term plans for Pied Piper, then fire Richard, the man that created Middle-Out overnight, for insubordination. However, this still would not be enough to fire Jack from Raviga's perspective. To Raviga's investors, it would look like an understandable move given Richard's behavior.
To fire Jack, and to solve the long term problem of his commercialization of Pied Piper, Gilfoyle, and Dinesh would need to tank the server platform. They need to make it so bad, that Raviga will realize that he's not fit to run the company. Raviga's investors would see a CEO who ignored its longterm wishes, who fired an industry icon, and then released a, "subpar," server platform while the competition (Hooli's former employees) gets the limelight for also cracking Middle-Out.
Jack gets fired and now Raviga searches for its next CEO of Pied Piper, but wait he's been there all along, it's Richard, and he's back like Steve Jobs, but he also has the real skunkworks plan in his back pocket. Between Richard's firing and the release of the sever, the hacker hostel has been hard at work developing the cloud platforms. Raviga will have no other option but to rehire Richard, release the platforms it desired, and fight off the competition.
