Microsoft yes (example: Windows Vista). The others... no. And that is a good thing, for them.

Google sure has multi-billion dollar projects. Chrome is an example. They're spending that much just _marketing_ the thing every year.

Even if we stick to just the development side, I would be very surprised if Google has not spent > 250 million a year on Chrome development over the last 4 years.

You think Google have had 1000+ people on Chrome for the past four years?

The marketing bit is a bit special since they don't actually spend any money by showcasing Chrome on google.com.

Edit: They do spend lots of money to get it pre-installed on new PCs, though.

Even ignoring the google.com thing, estimates are they're spending at least $500 million a year on Chrome marketing for ads on other sites, various bundling deals (including pre-installs on new PCs and auto-installs with other software), etc.

As far as people on Chrome go, you're right that back in 2008 they likely did not have 1000+ people on it. The best data I can find for mid-2008 on the Internet says about 50 in mid-2008.

Looking for newer data, according to the last several updates on http://peter.sh/ at this point there are about 100 daily WebKit commits (not all by Google, obviously) and about 120 daily Chromium commits. That's not counting the parts of Chrome that aren't WebKit or Chromium. What fraction of the WebKit commits are from Google is an interesting question; as of early 2010 according to http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2010/02/webkit-... it was around 40-45% and growing rapidly.

Now going from "number of commits" to "number of engineers" is hard. For comparison, as of today according to http://oduinn.com/blog/2012/09/04/infrastructure-load-for-au... Mozilla has about 200 commits per day, but about half of those are to the automated testing repository, not to the main code. So that's about 100 commits per day. Mozilla right now has around 700 employees, I believe. So if you assume similar commit patterns (which is an assumption, granted), Google certainly has 1000+ people on Chrome now.

But I'm also not sure you need 1000+ people to hit $250 million/year in spending. In addition to Silicon Valley compensation packages, there's also a lot of test infrastructure and whatnot as part of every browser project which costs nontrivial amounts of money to create and maintain.

Again for comparison, since there's data available there, Mozilla spent about $63 million on "software development" in 2010 ($85 million if you include stuff like office space, HR, marketing, etc) according to http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mf-2010-audited-... and had about 200 engineers at the time, I believe... and Mozilla does not give out huge stock bonuses, like Google has done with Chrome.

1000 engineers? Probably not, but likely many hundreds plus all the organizational support people like designers, product marketers, product managers, people managers, and admins.

Consider Google's opportunity cost for advertising on the "internet's home page". I've read estimates of $2B.

For a while, Google was also paying Adobe to bundle Chrome with Flash (in addition to bundling Flash with Chrome).

You're right about Google and Amazon, early posting on my part.

But I'd say the iPhone was easily a multi-billion dollar project.

I seem to recall iPhone 1.0 being called a $100 million dollar project in some Wired article. They were several hundred people (not thousands), working together for about 2-3 years. That seems sensible, and the numbers seem to add up.

Apple's strategy is to assign fewer people than you would expect when building a new product to ensure focus / reduce feature creep. Staffing on stable products are in line with what you would expect.

For example, I heard (from an ex-Apple co-worker) that the entire iTunes.app team was about 25 engineers. In contrast, Adobe's Flash plugin team had about 50 engineers (not including QA).