I think the ties arise because people are actively seeking areas of responsibility. Software components are an obvious grab if your eyes are on the software spe

I think the ties arise because people are actively seeking areas of responsibility. Software components are an obvious grab if your eyes are on the software specifically. But there are other ways of dividing your teams; based on for instance customers, use-cases, aspects of the code (performance, security). The problem is that the software usually keeps expanding until programmers find it hard to cope. If you split teams up so that some people are only concerned with a certain part of the codebase, chances are you are going to grow the size of the codebase by a quite large factor. I think there should be an incentive in place to keep the codebase small and understandable by most.