I think this is directly applicable to the current situation at Microsoft.
The number of contributors to the Windows codebase has risen dramatically over the last couple of years, while some other teams have remained at a fixed size (such as the XBox team and the Office team). It could be a (highly-unlikely) coincidence, but the end-user satisfaction with both the latter products is far greater than for Windows Vista.
Obviously a correlation does not imply causation, but it's certainly food for thought (even if slightly rehashed/redundant).
The book "the tipping point" (an old fad, I know) made a comment on this as well. Teams are exponentially harder to manage over a certain threshold. I believe there are a few companies who actually go so far as to arbitrarily limit the size of teams for this reason with some good success. (Goretex was the example in the book as I remember)
The number of contributors to the Windows codebase has risen dramatically over the last couple of years, while some other teams have remained at a fixed size (such as the XBox team and the Office team). It could be a (highly-unlikely) coincidence, but the end-user satisfaction with both the latter products is far greater than for Windows Vista.
Obviously a correlation does not imply causation, but it's certainly food for thought (even if slightly rehashed/redundant).