For further comparison, Google has in the region of 50,000 permanent employees globally.
By my count, Google has 50 products they support.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/products/
1000 employees per product (many of them small) seems asinine to me. I could definitely be wrong, but this seems like extremely low productivity. Does anyone have any insights into this?
A huge number of those are in operations, building the data centers and making them scalable and reliable. They're not supporting or allocated to a single product, they're making possible the platform that all those products run on.
Running data centers takes people, but any significant chunk of 50k? There is huge datacenter in my area, and only ~10 people work there.
This list doesn't seem to include Google's skunkworks projects like Google Fiber and self-driving cars. It also doesn't include Android or Glass.
Besides programmers there is probably a small army of sys admins to handle their data centers in additional to daily operational IT, business development folks working with partners, the entire ad/sales platform, lawyers and accountants. Plus all of the facility staff for that crazy office (kitchen staff, janitorial, gardeners, etc).
I agree though. That is a lot of people and it's hard to wrap my brain around that since I work at a very small software company of less than 10 people.