Hacking on your own can be fun, but no matter what it is,
projects really take the fuck off when a few heads are
working together. That’s how you get explosive momentum. No
matter how smart or driven you are, you cannot do it alone.
Groups help give explosive momentum, sure, but when it comes to starting projects or making bold developments, nah. I'm thinking of the precendents set with, say, Linus Torvalds and Linux, Matz and Ruby, or DHH and Rails. It takes the dictatorial "I'm making all the decisions and getting this to the next step" approach to really get a project going. Big shifts require hunkering down too - when Parrot and Perl 6 started, there were so few people involved, but they really kicked it off.
Of course, the open source world has proven that once you reach a point where you have something useful and not too experimental, it can only improve under the influence of others :)
When I say that they take off in the presence of multiple people, I'm not just referring to multiple decision-makers or coders. Sometimes just hearing "Wow, I'd like to use that, when will it be ready?" is enough to push something over the brink from "forgotten idea" to "working prototype".
Oh? I've found that a healthy nerdery is a key component to getting much of anything interesting done. For people who are so often socially stupid, and yet involved in business, which is so socially dependent, I'd think that the development of good nerderies would be a fairly relevant topic.
Maybe I'm just more socially stupid than the average nerd, so this stuff seems less obvious to me.
Of course, the open source world has proven that once you reach a point where you have something useful and not too experimental, it can only improve under the influence of others :)