Windows 8 App Store Officially Announced

Steven Sinofsky is on fire, one could think. Three blog posts about Microsoft’s upcoming operating system Windows 8 in three days: This could be a new record. The Introducing the team that builds Windows 8 post on the Building Windows 8 blog lists the Microsoft teams and divisions that help build the new operating system.

A total of 35 feature teams with 25 to 40 developers each is working on the operating system, and that’s without the test and program management. If you look at developers alone, you come up with a number between 875 and 1400 that are working on various Windows 8 features.

Some features benefit from synergies with other Microsoft products.

I mentioned earlier that Windows contributes code to lots of other products and vice versa, so when you look at this list, keep in mind there are features from other groups (for example, our browser language runtime comes from the development tools group) and some of the work here goes into other products, too. For example, all of our kernel, networking, storage, virtualization, and other fundamental OS work is also part of Windows Server—that’s right, one team delivers the full Windows Client OS and much of the foundation for the Windows Server OS. And some features are built in the core OS but are ultimately only part of the Server product.

When you look at the feature team listing, you will notice the App Store team near the top of the screen. Until now, an integrated app store in Windows 8 was nothing but a rumor. Jason posted some leaked app store screenshots back in April but there was no way to verify that the screenshots were indeed from an early Windows 8 build and not a fake.

The App Store team listing is a strong indicator that those screenshots might have indeed be from the app store that Microsoft intends to ship with Windows 8.

The listing furthermore confirms without doubt that Microsoft will integrate an app store into Windows 8. It will be interesting to see what the store will have to offer. Will it include only Microsoft products? Or will it be an open store, that offers both commercial and free software?

We do not know yet but will update as soon as we get more information about the Windows 8 app store.

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