Ahead of Microsoft's BUILD conference next month, the company's revealing still more details about Windows 8.

In a second posting on the "Building Windows 8" blog, Windows and Windows Live division President Stephen Sinofsky detailed the 35 "feature teams" building Microsoft's next operating system. "Each feature team has anywhere from 25-40 developers, plus test and program management, all working together," he wrote.

He also offered a list of Windows 8 "features or areas" under development. Lots of these seem obvious: "Graphics platform" or "media platform" don't leave much room for ambiguity, although it'll probably be some time before we have the fullest sense of such elements' look and functionality.

There are also some development areas with a bit more mystery. "Human Interaction Platform," for example, could refer to touch-based input and other, non-keyboard methods for interacting with the user interface (Windows 8 will appear on tablets in addition to traditional PCs). Some other techies have theorized that this element, along with some others, hints that Windows 8 will boast some interoperability with Kinect. I have a harder time seeing that, if only because a laptop or even a tablet isn't your television and Xbox; I'm not seeing very many Windows usage scenarios where hands-free gesture/voice control is optimum over other types of input.

Be that as it may, it seems a lot of the discussion surrounding Sinofsky's second posting has focused on the presence, in this feature list, of an App Store.

That's logical. A Microsoft-branded app store would directly counter Apple's Mac App Store, which lets users download applications to their desktop instead of having to purchase boxed software. Moreover, it would let Windows on tablets compete on equal footing against rivals such as the iPad (which offers access to Apple's App Store) and Android devices (which include Android Marketplace).

All that being said, actual details of Windows 8 remain relatively scarce, despite Sinofsky's lengthy postings and a few early-build videos and screenshots provided by Microsoft over the past few weeks. Personally, I'm curious to see whether people will embrace a new Windows that discards the "traditional" desktop model in favor of a UI centered on colorful, Windows Phone-style tiles.

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