Microsoft compares developing Windows 10 to ordering pizza

When looking for an analogy to use to describe what it’s like to develop an operating system, ordering pizzas is probably the last thing that comes to mind, but that’s exactly what Microsoft has compared the development of Windows 10 to. According to Mohammed Samji, one of Microsoft’s group managers, developing Windows 10 was a lot like “ordering pizza for one-and-a-half billion people.”

When Microsoft set out to build Windows 10, the company had a challenge to face: The operating system needed to appeal to the wide swath of people already using Windows. “We joke on our team that we’re ordering pizza for one-and-a-half billion people,” Mohammed Samji, a principal group program manager at Microsoft, said in an interview. In order to serve all of those users, Microsoft wanted Windows 10 to work well for people no matter what interface they chose. Windows 8 was criticized by people who thought that Microsoft had moved too much functionality around in order to accommodate and appeal to users of tablets. The company walked back some of the changes with its release of Windows 8.1, but this new update is designed to appeal further to traditional keyboard and mouse users alongside owners of touch devices.