How complicated must that piece of software have been for it to cost that much? For that kind of money it better be at least as complex as any OS out there.
I would wager good money that you could supply thedailywtf.com with entries every day for a month from the code base of this project, easily. When you do the math it works out to something like $100 million a year, which implies a fairly large development team (hundreds of people, at a bare minimum).
It's really easy to waste money on big development projects of this sort. The bigger the development team the harder it is to manage, the less well it is managed the less productive it is in aggregate, and thus the less productive it is per salary-dollar. And these are not small effects. A small team of very talented devs can quite easily compete head to head with a giant team of hundreds of devs, precisely because of these scaling and management problems.
