Last week’s IFA show in Berlin may well have been the first and last time we saw Microsoft in a fully-fledged handset launch. It was building on the heritage it acquired with Nokia’s devices business – highly specified, mid-priced cellphones – but there are many signs that CEO Satya Nadella has little appetite for his predecessor’s vision of integrating hardware and software, Apple-style. Instead, he is interested in reaching out to the entire base of mobile and embedded devices with Microsoft’s cloud services and its operating system – at least for now. Windows remains a cornerstone of the business, but having failed in mobile, it is likely that its power will decrease over time.
Nadella has sent out early signs. In his first weeks as CEO, he announced the new version of mobile Office – an iconic product for Microsoft – for iOS and Android before Windows Phone. Now Microsoft is showing off its change of direction – overdue and hardly original, but a huge symbolic shift nonetheless – with another of its high profile properties, MSN.
This has been revamped with a clear focus on a consistent user experience across all mobile and PC devices, including seamless syncing between them. And in the coming months, Microsoft plans to release MSN apps across iOS and Android as well as Windows.
The company says it has rebuilt MSN from the ground up to support Nadella’s mantra – ‘mobile-first, cloud-first’
“The new MSN helps people complete their key digital tasks across all of their devices,” wrote Brian MacDonald, Microsoft’s corporate VP president for information and content experiences, in a blog post. “Information and personalized settings are roamed through the cloud to keep users in the know wherever they are.”
Microsoft says it has introduced a cleaner design and many new tools, which aim to make MSN more than a portal, and instead a hub for accessing and collating all kinds of information sources, providing easy access to personal productivity apps and many data feeds.
This is hardly radical in the way that Microsoft’s Cortana is, but it indicates the overall strategy to make developers’ lives easier by creating a unified platform. The harmonized MSN is a foretaste of the next Windows release, which promises to build on recent convergence work between different versions, and create a common development platform for all Windows-supporting products.
As well as its moves towards a common experience, regardless of device or even OS, Microsoft needs to keep MSN relevant. Despite its 437m users worldwide, it is a portal – and users increasingly see social media or personal assistant systems as the main hub for their web and communications activities, not portals. Therefore, MSN needs to be part of a broader and more modern user experience. Cortana is the key weapon here, garnering strong response since going live on some Windows Phone devices in recent weeks and providing a modern, AI-driven approach to search. MacDonald wrote: “You only need to set your favorites once, and your preferences will be connected across MSN, Cortana, Bing and other Microsoft experiences.”
To encourage users to take another look, Microsoft has signed over 1,300 publishers to support the relaunch of MSN and try to make its site a key destination for content information. They include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNN.
A ‘Services Stripe’ at the top of the homepage gives easy access to personal services such as Outlook.com email, OneDrive, Office 365 and Skype, as well as third party sites like Twitter and Facebook. It also offers a host of tools based on ‘actionable information’, such as shopping list, symptom checker and even a 3D body explorer.