[khazhoux]

This part stands out to me:

> The Windows 95 user interface design team was formed in October, 1992... The number of people oscillated during the project but was approximately twelve. The software developers dedicated to implementing the user interface accounted for another twelve or so people

I still don't understand what happened starting around 2010-ish (from my observations at the time) that we went from being able to handle a company's worth of software with 30 people, to needing 30 people for every individual project. Startups with minor products had team-pages with 15 people.

[markus_zhang]

From what I remember, Windows NT kernel 3.1 team had about 50 persons, and when they reached 4.0 it was about 200 persons. And then there are application writers. It was definitely a lot than just a few dozens.

[abanana]

Those numbers are UI only. 12 just to design it, another 12 to build it. That's not counting the vastly larger number of developers who built all the various elements of the underlying codebase.

Team bloat is a real issue but I don't think this case is relevant.

[titzer]

Microsoft had thousands of people working on Windows. Sun Microsystems had thousands of people working on Java.

[zokier]

Microsoft had around 5k people in r&d in 1995. And that covered the full wide product range, win95, nt, office, visualc, sql server, and all the other stuff.

[tbossanova]

Yes and with all these huge and siloed teams you end up with no consistency even within a single app