Windows Prez (Kind Of) Confirms A Windows 8 App Store

Microsoft details its Windows 8 team, confirms App Store plans

Microsoft detailed its Windows 8 team in a new post to the building Windows 8 blog on Wednesday.

Steven Sinofsky, President of the Windows Division at Microsoft, penned a new blog entitled “Introducing the team” to detail the team structure. “Windows is a fairly broad project made up of a set of coordinated smaller projects,” said Sinofsky. “When we started building Windows 8 we had a clear sense of the direction we were heading and so we built a team structure to support that direction.” Sinofsky goes on to detail how Windows team members work as a team and independently to complete the various bits of the Windows operating system. Microsoft has several engineering roles that implement the work to be done on Windows as developers create code for the operating system. The Windows work is organised into “feature teams” who own a number of features across Windows. “We have about 35 feature teams in the Windows 8 organization,” says Sinofsky. “Each feature team has anywhere from 25-40 developers, plus test and program management, all working together.”

Click to expand...

After months of near silence, Microsoft is starting to talk publicly about Windows 8. Earlier this week the company started a new "Building Windows 8" blog, and Windows Live Division President Steven Sinofsky provided the first concrete information about the operating system in a post on Wednesday.

The post gives a high-level overview of how Windows 8's development is organized and the different feature areas the teams are working on. Most of these, such as "Kernel Platform," "Networking Core," and "Performance," held no surprises, but a few of the teams are more interesting. One is called "App Store," which confirms the rumor that Windows 8 will include an application store feature—there were slides leaked last year that made mention of a Windows Store. As with any as-yet-unreleased product, nothing is set in stone, but this information makes it all but certain that such a store will be a part of Windows 8.

Click to expand...