With the launch of the “Building Windows 8″ blog, project president Steven Sinofsky listed the features that Windows 8 will have but there was one particular feature that caught everyone’s eye, and it’s the App Store.  It looks like Microsoft is following Apple’s footsteps–they launched the Mac App Store after seeing the success of the App Store.

The purpose of the blog is to open communication between users and developers to make Windows 8 better, but full details about the OS won’t be disclosed until their BUILD Conference in Anaheim, California, which will run from September 13-16 of this year.

The Windows 8 Team is subdivided into “feature teams” which consists of 25-40 developers, test and program management aside from the seven larger teams that will be responsible for fundamentals, devices and networking, core OS, developer experience, user experience, Web services, and engineering.

“Folks want new things, and changes to existing things; they want features to be available globally, to be accessible, and to be super high quality; they want things to work on existing hardware, and to take advantage of the latest new hardware.  Our job is to get as much done in as short a time as possible, at a very significant scale. That’s all a pretty significant engineering effort.” Sinofsky wrote.

With the inclusion of an app store in Windows 8, some are now looking at its possible effect on the social enterprise and how it would compare to existing app stores like the Mac App Store, the Android Marketplace and the likes.

First off, there are more Windows users compared to Mac users from a global view, so it’s likely that the Windows App Store will gather a large user population and higher revenue compared to Mac’s.  Simply put, more app developers who will create Windows-compatible apps will most likely earn more compared with making apps just for Macs or other app stores.

But independent, integrated app stores are becoming a common way to gain services for a given platform, and are becoming marketing outlets for varied initiatives across our cloud-based enterprise world.  Cisco is one company looking to app stores, while Google has a similar outlet for Chrome apps as well.