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...