[com2kid]

Microsoft has plenty of similar stories, perhaps most famously the story of how Xbox was developed.

I was lucky to be at MSFT during what might have been the last gasps of when a single person could have a huge impact, and it was something I saw from time to time, but it by the 00s and surely the 2010s, it was in huge decline vs the stories that were told about the 1990s.

Edit: Someone posted below about how Windows 3.0 was also a misfit project.

There is also F#, which has had a huge impact on C#.

The entire async framework in .NET was originally developed by a small team headed up by one brilliant engineer.

Silverlight started as a project by a small team in Microsoft Research to see if they could shrink .NET's runtime down to be small enough to complete with Flash.