Yea, but that doesn't mean you still don't get some additional speed out of hiring more developers, especially when correctly organized, with sane management po

Yea, but that doesn't mean you still don't get some additional speed out of hiring more developers, especially when correctly organized, with sane management policies, and good software development practices. The point is that Microsoft has the money to hire 100x more developers than the other guys, they should at least be well organized enough to deploy a part of that man power effectively. Lets put it this way, there are 7 companies out there (at least) maintaining various different distributions of UNIX that can patch quickly, why can't Microsoft patch their 7 operating systems as quickly? From my view what you are saying is that because Microsoft is a monolithic company with 7 code bases it is somehow harder than 7 companies with 1 code base each? How does that track? Especially when Microsoft has a 100x more money than each of those other companies. I'm not saying there is such a thing as a man-month. I'm saying there are ways to organize production, teams, and software so that people can provide more work than in poorly managed environments.