[mikestew]

I think the confusion comes from...

For some, the confusion comes from "wow, that's about half the headcount that Microsoft had when I started in the mid-90s, and MSFT was building, selling, and supporting Windows, Visual Studio, Office,..." Perhaps DocuSign's products are, in fact, about half of Microsoft's big three products, but of what I know of DocuSign it's still a big number to me.

[nradov]

Microsoft in the mid-90s outsourced the majority of sales and customer support to retailers and VARs. If you add up all the employees working to sell and support Microsoft products in external companies the total staffing was enormous. The same situation applied to their competitors like Novell.

[calrueb]

I wasn't around then but is it possible that we have learned more about B2B SaaS since the mid-90s through trial and error? And the conclusion the industry has come to is Microsoft would have been better off at that time with more sellers and customer ops hires?

[Spooky23]

Microsoft always sold through the channel. There were probably a half million people selling Microsoft stuff in the 90s.

[lupire]

Population growth since 1995: 30%

Computer/Online service usage growth: a lot more!

[hotpotamus]

How many programmers did Microsoft need for 1 million OS installs vs 1 billion? The reason software can be such a money maker is that the marginal unit costs are close to zero.

[alehlopeh]

Why does Microsoft get to be evaluated in 1994? How many people are working on their OS right now?

[hotpotamus]

I don't know the answer to either of those questions. But I don't think the economics of desktop OS distribution have changed all that much in the last 30 years. I'd imagine the marginal unit costs have gone from very cheap to basically nothing now that physical media is a rarity. If modern OSes take more development effort (which seems likely), I don't think that changes the economics.

[Phrenzy]

I for one am on the QA team. No, I do not work at Microsoft or any of its partners. I just use their operating systems.