MSN Brand Relaunched

While the MSN messenger has taken it’s last breath, MSN as a brand is still alive and kicking. Microsoft has just announced the relaunch of the MSN brand into a more mobile and cloud orientated service. While many, actually probably most of our readers, have used MSN messenger over the years, not everyone knew that it had an attached news side. It has to be said though that it was highly US centric on the news side and rarely relevant for people outside. It probably got the most hits from being Internet Explorers start page.

Microsoft acknowledge that the way we use media has changed and is trying to follow the users with their new layout, a Mobile-first, Cloud-first world as they call it. The new MSN is said to bring together media sources from all around the world along with data and services to enable users to do more in News, Sports, Money, Travel, Food & Drink, Health & Fitness, and more. It focuses on the primary digital daily habits in people’s lives and helps them complete tasks across all of their devices. Information and personalized settings are roamed through the cloud to keep users in the know wherever they are.

I don’t know whether it’s cause the Bing name never really got accepted, and kinda sounds silly, or it’s cause MSN always was kind of loved, but it looks like the Bing apps for the above mentioned categories will be renamed into MSN instead, MSN Sports for example. This also goes for the iOS and Android versions of the apps. Microsoft wants to deliver the same experience on any device. It will also integrate direct access to your Office 365, if you use that, and of course also Skype.

The new design is a big improvement over the old, that’s for sure. But whether it will be accepted by the end-users outside of the Microsoft mobile user-base, that’s something only time can tell. The new platform can already be tested at preview.msn.com.

Thank you Microsoft for proving us with this information

Images courtesy of Microsoft.