[AlisdairO]

They do make many billions profit on software every single quarter. Who cares if the market is not very sexy?

If you think there's only 25 people working on Word, I think you're off by an extremely large margin.

[easytiger]

They make billions by corporate lobbying and political marketing

[AlisdairO]

I wasn't commenting on IBM's methods - although I think attributing the entirety of their profit to scammery is extremely far-fetched - but on the choice of market. My comment was simply to point out that I don't think there's any shame in targeting boring market segments, and that there's clearly plenty of money to be made.

[aragot]

If you planned on making a competitor of Word, would you copy all its features and throw 5,000 people at it? Of course not.

No, I don't think Word is 25 people. But a relationship of mine made an Excel in js with 3 people and sold enough copies.

Before you say I'm wrong again, no this Excel-in-js isn't isofunctional. It's just what the customer needs.

Point being: You can make great software with few people, and IBM could do it easily.

[AlisdairO]

> Before you say I'm wrong again, no this Excel-in-js isn't isofunctional. It's just what the customer needs.

isofunctionality is implied by saying you could make 'a Word'. I wouldn't dream of disputing that you could make a word processor that offers some limited subset of Word's functionality with a small team - but that's not making a Word-class product, it's making a simple word processor.

[aragot]

I agree we can't reproduce Microsoft Word with isofunctionality with 25 people (obviously). I agree my past comment made it sound like that.

I currently feel negatively from the readers, so I'm testing that again: I've written a comment below with figures and sources to back my claims - See comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8956544