Behind-the-scenes perspective

From a behind-the-scenes perspective, Microsoft's week must have been enormously busy. Between archrival Google announcing its intention to acquire Motorola and hardware partner Hewlett-Packard announcing its imminent exit from the PC business, there was more than enough to keep Redmond's executives in battle-stations mode.

If that wasn't frantic enough, the company as well began the inevitable ramp-up of its Windows 8 marketing campaign and wrestled with an outage of its Office 365 cloud service.

Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live division, kicked off the new "Building Windows 8" blog with an Aug. 15 posting that described Windows 8's radical user-interface changes, most notably the abandonment of the "traditional" Windows desktop model in favor of colorful, Windows Phone-style tiles-all the better, to all appearances, to port the upcoming operating system onto touch-friendly form factors just as tablets.

"So much has changed since Windows 95-the last time Windows was significantly overhauled-when the 'desktop' metaphor was established," Sinofsky wrote in the inaugural Aug. 15 posting. "Today, more than two out of three PCs are mobile. Near every PC is capable of wireless connectivity."

Few days later

In his second posting a few days later, he described the engineering teams putting the operating system at the same time. "We have about 35 feature teams in the Windows 8 organization," he wrote. "Each feature team has anywhere from 25-40 developers, plus test and program management, all working at the same time." He at that time provided a list of "features or areas" pursuant to this agreement construction by those teams, including "Graphics Platform," "Hyper-V," "Media Platform" when all is said and done on.

According to Sinofsky's feature list, Windows 8 will as well feature an App Store of some sort. That could directly counter Apple's Mac App Store, which lets users download applications to their desktop instead of having to purchase boxed software. The presence of a Microsoft-branded App Store would as well let Windows on tablets compete on equal footing against rivals just as the iPad and Android devices.

Few hours' worth of outages for its Office 365

Microsoft as well had to deal with a few hours' worth of outages for its Office 365 and CRM services Aug. 17. A spokesperson later told eWEEK that the downtime was due to a "networking issue" at "one of our North American data centers."

Microsoft launched the final version of Office 365, its cloud-based productivity software, with a June event in New York City hosted by CEO Steve Ballmer. The new offering was supposed to be much more stable, in terms of downtime, than its BPOS predecessor. And like Windows 8, it's one of the products that Microsoft hopes will define its future.