Comment by quandrum

I'm not sure he's arguing the individuals are making better decisions, but rather the sum of thousand developers making decisions is better than the shareholders the C levels at Microsoft.

I think a good analogy is centralized government economies vs private enterprise economies. The less people you have making key decisions and the more isolated you are from the effects of bad decisions, the easier it is to evolve and improve.

Obviously open source has a lot of failures and took a long time to catch up in certain areas. But things like the Linux kernel have become a massive, unstoppable force that's evolving quicker and more efficiently than ever before. Microsoft simply can't compete with the hundreds of companies and tens of thousands of developers working on it.