More than nine months into the great revamping known as Windows 8, a clear vision of its core is finally starting to emerge. The baked-in apps have been streamlined and Windows 8.1 looms, ready to polish the numerous rough edges found in the original release of the operating system. But Microsoft alone can’t improve what is truly the beating heart of Windows 8: The Windows Store.
Windows 8 revolves around the Windows Store. Every Live Tile that glimmers on the modern-style Start screen is the iconic representation of a Windows 8 app—and you can only snag Windows 8 apps in Microsoft’s own Windows Store. As the Windows Store goes, so goes the Windows 8 experience.
How, exactly, is the Windows Store doing? The obvious indicators are mixed. Windows RT devices can run only modern-style apps, not desktop apps, and they’re tanking hard. But app submissions picked up steam around the time of Microsoft’s Build conference, culminating in the shattering of the 100,000-app barrier in early July, and they’re still going (relatively) strong.
That’s a great milestone for Microsoft, but it’s still paltry compared to the approximately 1 million apps in Google Play and 900,000 apps in Apple’s App Store. So it’s a good time to take the pulse of the Windows Store again: Is 100,000 apps enough to keep a body happy? As I did last February, I spent days scouring the Windows Store and taking notes in five major categories: games, music apps, video apps, social apps, and a catch-all “other” category—to see how well Microsoft covered each. Here’s how they all measured up.
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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld




