When I mean the people involved I didn't mean mostly the software engineers, like you show they probably have the least contribution to the success of these projects. But the point stands that the products have to exist in the same level of bureocracy and disfunctional leadership, so someone must've been better at dealing with that in the successful products. I definitely had really good experiences as a user of several of AWS's things from the same time. Maybe it's more on product leadership but I was just musing about it. To your original question I haven't worked on such big corporations no, max size I've experienced is ~2k people for ~6 months, other than that 10-400 - so I can see how it's also a different beast.