ruff

Yeah, should have been clearer--I do think the dev teams at Apple for the same product tend to be smaller than the equivalent team in Microsoft (just, specifically, I know that some of the teams you mentioned have grown). The small teams at Apple probably enforce all sorts of interesting functions such as not chasing half-baked features and leveraging more platform/shared code rather than Microsoft's often NIH approach to things.

Apple lets go of a number of things that Microsoft chases such as a religious concern for backwards compatibility, globalized features (not just localization but geo-specific features), and deep product extensibility with corresponding dev support. No judgment on those decisions but I'd argue that the size of MS teams isn't directly reflected in the product or features most folks consider as users of Microsoft's products and I wouldn't criticize MS based on those team sizes (as the author of this article does). Instead, I'd criticize the PMs or other managers inability to bring focus to those teams to clearly tackle the right problems at the right level of investment at the right time. It takes a lot of discipline to say "no."

As someone very familiar with the PM process at Microsoft--I don't totally agree with the conclusion. PMs can be incredibly valuable to a team and are, in a different way, a creator/do-er. Unfortunately, most PMs construct obstacles and walls rather than bring focus and help a development team navigate their direction.

Also, one thing I see a lot of PMs who follow the "minimalist" approach confuse is that the idea isn't really to remove features to strip the product down to it's bare capabilities in the name of minimalism or elegance (while not a bad exercise, can make certain types of differentiation challenging in a competitive space). Instead, it's about good design and delivering quality on the core user scenarios rather than allowing yourself to stray to "it'd be cool to do this" without fulling thinking through the needs of your users, the resulting user experience, and the dilution of effort on your dev and QA team by chasing those edge scenarios. It's that lack of focus and discipline that ultimately leads to features that need to be removed.

That's not quite the case any more--those teams have gotten larger over the years (from what I've heard). That said, building the right features/product is often a lot about focus and focus is much easier to obtain with a smaller team. Apple's are definitely smaller than Microsoft's but Apple, imo, also tends to hire developers who are more considerate of or passionate of customers than Microsoft's more tech-oriented engineers.