[aragot]

Please provide your own estimates on how many people are required to make great software. Not talking about Word in particular.

I've worked in large companies, now I make a living off my own company, so I must know something about software teams, complexity and feature creep. I didn't provide these estimates in the void.

[jacquesm]

> I didn't provide these estimates in the void.

Actually, that's exactly what you did.

You made a specific claim about a specific piece of software and you failed to back that up with so much as a shred of evidence.

[aragot]

Let's take public figures I can talk about: According to Wikipedia [1], Atlassian has 1148 employees and 20 products. It's 57 employees by product. BUT Atlassian also grew by 44% in 2014, [1] and recruits intensively, so we can estimate that they had 797 employees in 2013. If correct, it means the products they have now have been built by 40ppl on average, including support people, accountants and marketing. Sorry I know some products are bigger than others and I can't talk about those specifics.

And Atlassian does make world-class products which certainly compete with IBM. Please downvote if you prefer IBM ClearQuest to Atlassian JIRA.

I apologize for making an unbounded claim. It was unprecise because I didn't want to be specific about previous workplaces I've worked at. I have felt a shred of hatred from the HN community in the present situation, with the downvotes and negative comments.

Internet Explorer 3 had 100 people and IE5 a thousand [4], which is superior to the figure I was once told, which was 25 people for the development team. I had never been surprised by that low number because complexity grows exponentially and brings problems. I admit downvoters were right that Word didn't take 25 people to build, because of course everyone knows Microsoft has 128k employees [6].

GitHub is 255 employees[3] - Half of which for Enterprise [unbounded claim] and they weren't so many when they got famous. Git itself has had 100 developers over its history [5]; If they were employees, they wouldn't have been simultaneous employees.

So let's change my proposal: Who thinks world-class products are built by rather medium teams (<100 employees) in a few years (about 3 years)? Who has estimates for well-known products?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian

[2] https://www.atlassian.com/company/press/press-releases/atlas...

[3] https://github.com/about/team

[4] http://www.citeworld.com/article/2147006/consumerization/int...

[5] https://github.com/git/git/graphs/contributors

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft