Earlier this
month, we unveiled a first look at the new MSN. Over the past 3 weeks,
nearly 10 million of you took the opportunity to test out the new site and
more than 80,000 of you even took the time to tell us what you thought. Based
on your feedback, we have made significant changes to the site. From everyone
here, a sincere thank you.
Over the next 72 hours, we will roll out the new MSN to the over 425M people
in over 50 countries around the world that come to the site each
month. In addition, people using Windows and Windows Phone 8.1
will have the option to update their devices to the new MSN apps starting
today. At the top of the homepage you will see easy one click access to all of
your favorite services including Outlook.com, Office, OneNote, OneDrive,
Skype, Facebook and Twitter. Today we are also pleased to add Gmail to the
services stripe.
The New MSN is Here
The new MSN was built from the ground up – every line of code was
rewritten for a cloud first, mobile-first world. When fully rolled out, this
will be largest deployment of Windows Azure in production ever
released. We did this to ensure that you have one consistent
experience regardless of whether you are accessing your stocks in MSN Money,
your favorite sports teams in MSN Sports, or your recipe collections in MSN
Food & Drink, those things will always be with you across your devices.
The new MSN provides a global, comprehensive perspective from thousands of
worldwide, authoritative sources across 11 categories. It’s
simple to personalize what you want to see based on your interests. In the
coming months, we will release a suite of MSN apps across iOS and Android to
complement today’s release of the Windows and Windows Phone apps. You
only need to set your favorites once, and your preferences will be connected
across MSN, Cortana, Bing and other Microsoft experiences.
MSN App Updates Arrive on Windows 8.1
In Windows 8, we introduced Bing Apps to help you explore your world with a
set of immersive vertical experiences. With today’s release, we now have
one unified, consistent experience that span the apps on your Windows 8.1
device to MSN in the cloud. While Bing will continue to provide search and
intelligent experiences, now the apps will be branded to reflect their
alignment with the MSN as a premium experience for content combined with
personal productivity features. Aside from Bing Finance which will now be MSN
Money all of the apps retain their existing names.
We are also rolling out updates to the Health & Fitness and Weather apps
making it easier to access what’s happening from the lock screen of your
phone. Now at a glance, you will see up-to-the-minute weather
status from the Weather app. If you’re running the Nokia 1520, 630 or
635, you can keep track of steps taken via the pedometer and GPS tracker in
the Health and Fitness App directly from the lockscreen. No need to launch the
individual apps.
World Class Content
With the new MSN, we focused on bringing the best-in-class content from the
leaders in both content and data from around the world. In the US, some of our
premier partners include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The
Washington Post, CNN, AOL (including TechCrunch and Huffington Post) and Condé
Nast (including Vanity Fair, Epicurious, Bon Appétit).
Worldwide, we’re excited to showcase The Yomiuri Shimbun and The Asahi
Shimbun in Japan; Sky News, The Guardian and the Telegraph in the UK, NDTV and
Hindustan Times in India, Le Figaro and Le Monde in France, and many more.
As autumn has just arrived, we urge people to go check out the site and
customize the Sports experience to showcase your favorite NFL team or peruse
the Food & Drink section to find that perfect recipe for fall.
Keep the feedback coming – we’re listening.
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Brian MacDonald, Corporate Vice President, Information and Content
Experiences