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Fear the team of two
The team to fear
When Basecamp launched in the early 2000s, everyone predicted Microsoft would turn it into a feature of Project. The founders were not worried, because a company that size can only produce software shaped like itself. A small team working under the same constraints would build something competitive. Whether that still holds when a small team can act like a large company is harder to say.
The resource curse
Unlimited resources work like the resource curse: a country with wealth springing out of the ground has no reason to develop its economy or society. Microsoft's office suite is the result, and the joke today is that there are several versions of Outlook, including Outlook new, Outlook new (old), and Outlook new (2026).
Seven people, four products
Companies that raise enormous sums, hire hundreds of people, and produce poor software show the same effect. By 2007, seven people at 37signals had four major products, launching about one a year while still running Basecamp. With 100 people there is no narrow funnel forcing a choice among the 100 things customers ask for, so only three can be built and they had better count.
How does a resource curse hurt a country?
Economist Richard Auty coined the term resource curse in 1993 to describe mineral-rich countries that grew more slowly than poorer neighbors. A 1995 paper by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner found a negative link between natural resource exports and economic growth across many countries. Easy export income can reduce pressure to build other industries, and it can push up the currency so that other exports become expensive. Economists call the second effect Dutch disease, after the Netherlands' gas boom in the 1960s.
Why do big companies build software shaped like themselves?
Programmer Melvin Conway observed in 1967 that organizations design systems that copy their own communication structures. Datamation published his paper in 1968, and the idea became known as Conway's law. A company split into five departments tends to ship a product with five loosely joined parts. Fred Brooks later cited the observation in his own writing on software teams.
Why do large teams ship slower?
In The Mythical Man-Month, published in 1975, IBM engineer Fred Brooks argued that adding people to a late software project makes it later. Each new person must be brought up to speed, which takes time from the people already there. The number of possible communication paths also grows quickly: a team of 5 has 10 pairs, while a team of 50 has 1,225. Brooks had managed development of IBM's OS/360 in the 1960s.
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