[chaboud]

The real core of NT, the kernel team, could have been fed by two pizzas (if they could agree on the toppings). I didn’t work at Microsoft, but I had some occasions to meet with them (I was working on high performance media tools that squeezed a lot out of a little at the time). They kept a tight ship and designed systems that they genuinely had understanding of. Linux has had similar guidance, and my contact with the Fuchsia team in the early days showed signs of the core design tenets (e.g., object capability permissions model) having been well considered before broadening the effort and resourcing.

Different ecosystems have gone through phases of mass and focus, but times of concise clarity of vision from small groups (e.g., hardware rendering in Android 4.x, early days of CoreAudio, NTFS) move mountains that large teams never could.