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I don't want to minimize their achievements, but it never takes one or two people to build something that large. There is an entire organization to support their efforts -- sales, customer support, QA, etc... There is a tendency to "hero"-ize developers in big companies, but at the end of the day it is an organization-wide effort.

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I was referring to the actual programming only. Sorry if I inferred otherwise.

Even so, that usually applies only up to a certain point in time. Once the company is big enough, they'll hire an army of maintenance programmers to continue improving the software.

For example, Tom Proulx wrote the first version of Quicken basically singlehandedly, but it's probably a whole department inside Intuit working on it now. Paul Buchheit is normally associated with GMail, but the GMail team is huge. Linus Torvalds wrote the first version of Linux, but hundreds if not thousands of people have contributed patches.

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