Microsoft is ramping up its marketing campaign for Windows 8, the next version of its popular operating system franchise due to arrive (reportedly) sometime in 2012. In addition to revealing more details at next month's BUILD conference, Windows and Windows Live division President Stephen Sinofsky has been posting to the official "Building Windows 8" blog, most recently about the engineering teams who're constructing the platform. Despite this early publicity push, we know precious little about what will surely be a host of new features—although Microsoft started trumpeting early on how Windows 8 will run not only on traditional desktops and laptops, but also tablets. Windows 8 faces at least one substantial obstacle to widespread adoption: Windows 7, which has sold hundreds of millions of copies since its October 2009 debut. That's helped Microsoft accomplish its goal of breaking the increasingly antiquated XP's lock on the PC market, but it could make consumers and businesses reluctant to embrace another upgrade so soon. In the end, Microsoft can only hope that Windows 8 offers a substantial value-add in the form of new features, increased cloud integration, and the ability to play well on hot devices such as tablets. The following are some of the features and details we know so far about Windows 8.