Laptops Arena

Although many of the Internet users don’t pay too much attention to the MSN portal, Microsoft online business is working to find another image for the MSN’s decade-old portal site. Its display is the mark of ad business as MSN is responsible for almost half of the company’s Internet search traffic. Lately Microsoft has done some researches in this matter and says that as much as the notion of portal is worn-out, it has been revealed that 37% of Internet users still depend on a portal as an important source of information.

In this respect Microsoft is having an attempt to customize MSN in some of its key ways. The company wants to add a restricted amount of personalization and some more social features. While doing this, Microsoft needs to take careful steps, since there is a precedent in the matter; few years back they tried to alter its Hotmail service and the result was that many of the users complained on its incompatibility.

If you think better we can say that MSN home page (old since 1998) has suffered unnoticeable changes in the recent years. On several occasions, Microsoft has freshened up the image of the portal, such as the addition of a butterfly logo, back in 2000, and lately in 2006, the company has attracted MSNBC’s John Nicol to be the general maanger of Microsoft’s portal. Back then John Nicol was said that the company had planned to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to “build the network into what it should be”, as Mr. Nicol affirmed in an interview with CNET News. So he set out for this challenging job as he had a big competition from market leader Yahoo and Time Warner’s America Online unit. Much of his effort was centered to support the site’s video content, while Microsoft brought some key events to MSN.

The problem for Microsoft seems to be how much they have to personalize the site; products like Strat.com (and later Live.com) page have been offered, which started as a blank canvas on which users could plug all sorts of content modules, but in the end that didn’t prove to be so appealing. Microsoft is counting on software, rather than humans, to choose which events go where on MSN. Instead of an editor’s updating, the renovated MSN will see events shifting constantly to the ones that are appealing to the users. Microsoft hopes to create a site with more know-how software and more human as well.

Around the world some of these changes have been given to be tested; in France, for instance, the software maker is testing the new user interface, in Brazil, MSN has a far more radical remake featuring a social media bar. Microsoft still try to figure out how big are the changes they need to make and at what extent they need to unfold them. Also the segmentation of the audience is an issue; the company has an MSN Today screen that counts the users as they log in. The past three months, is has been used four different screen to delimitate the users’ gender and whether he or she is over or under 25. But no matter how many issues they stumble into, it just can’t be one size to fit all, as Jorgensen said.