> Mind you, arguably the same principle applies any time anybody designs a 
> new product. How long does it take to design and build a house? Well, you 
> can take an educated guess, but...

Usually you can break the task down into smaller ones and then each of them 
down again, until some sensible limit.  You (as a team or company or group 
of companies) should then be able to quite accurately estimate how long each 
of those tasks is going to take, assuming you have done anything similar 
before.  You then get all those nice "critical path" diagrams using MS 
Project that show you where the bottlenecks are and what's taking up all the 
time.

For example, suppose you know that you need a GUI developed for your latest 
piece of software, presumably you employ someone with experience of this, 
and they can break it down into different parts, some of which might rely on 
other parts of the software being completed first, and then at least have a 
reasonable idea of how long each part is going to take.  Sure they might hit 
problems along the way, everyone does not just in software, but this happens 
less often to a skilled and experienced team.

I remember reading somewhere that people are pretty accurate at estimating 
how long it will take them to do things, it's just they consistently over- 
or underestimate the time.  So as long as you (as a project manager) have 
some record of the peron's previous work, you should be able to get a good 
idea how long it will take just by asking them and factoring out their 
internal time scale multiplier :-)

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