MSN Investing In More Than Just Search


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The new MSN Search is looking like a 2005 deliverable. In the meantime, MSN plans to deliver new MSN Messenger, small-business and personalization services.

Microsoft's MSN unit has a lot more than just new search and online music services on its new product plate.

MSN Vice President Yusuf Mehdi, in a keynote address on Wednesday at Goldman Sachs' fifth annual Internet conference in Las Vegas, shed a bit more light on a handful of the next-gen services on which the unit is pinning its hopes.

While Mehdi didn't outline any timetables, he told the institutional investors attending the conference that MSN is working simultaneously on its totally revamped MSN Search; new add-ons to its MSN Messenger instant-messaging service; and MSN Music service. At the same time, MSN is readying new mechanisms designed to deliver more ad targeting and personalization from the MSN home page, as well as new entertainment and small-business services, he said.

Company watchers are expecting MSN to launch its new music service this year, and its search service by late this year or early next. But Mehdi hinted that the totally rewritten MSN Search service is running later than expected.

"Within 12 months, if not sooner, we'll have a test version (Release 1.0) out," Mehdi told conference attendees.

Microsoft has not explicit about the overlap between MSN Search and the search facility that will be built into the Windows Longhorn release that is due out in 2006+. Members of both the MSN teams and the Longhorn teams have spoken of wanting to deliver a search facility that will work across a user's local file system, a corporate Intranet and the Internet. But whether Microsoft is working on a single search facility or more than one that will handle these tasks is murky.

Mehdi offered a few veiled hints about the interrelationship between MSN Search and Longhorn search.

"There will be a lot of innovation that we're going to do in MSN oriented search," he said, in response to a question at the end of his keynote address. "And to be fair, there's a lot of cross-company investment in search from a number of people," including Microsoft Research, the Office group and the company's advanced user interface group.

"But we will do an MSN search starting shortly with a beta and well before Longhorn ships everything across local PC search, e-mail search, Web search, deep database search, and that will, as far I think as the consumer is concerned, be an end-to-end system for searching across any data types," Mehdi continued.

(MSN Search already is in beta in selected areas. Mehdi seemingly was referring to a broader, public beta test.)

"So we're going to do the work to figure out how and when we add value to Longhorn," Mehdi said. "There's no specific plans. We've had a lot of discussion, nothing to really talk about yet. But we certainly will do that effort but I think it's fair to say that we will tackle of the things that you'd expect, even PC search, as part of the MSN effort well before the Longhorn time period."

Overall, "our view of the search market, based on consumer research, is that one out of every two search queries doesn't get an answer," Mehdi said. "People go online looking for something. They don't get an answer. When they do get an answer they get a list of Web links, not necessarily the data they want. And the opportunity to solve that problem is something that we're going after directly and tackling."

But MSN isn't wholly focused on search, Mehdi emphasized.

"On Messenger there's a bunch of efforts there around what we're doing in the MSN messaging space to dramatically improve that phenomenon," he said. "There are a number of ideas that we've got coming in there. If you look at a number of things like even social networking and how people that you know becomes an amazing opportunity to validate things that you might do that are commerce related.

"We talk about shopping and the best thing that happens in the shopping side is not so much what experts say or what the World Wide Web says but what people that you trust say. That's a big value opportunity that's not been tapped I think in large margin and I think that's something that we'll look to try and tap," he continued.

Other areas where Mehdi expects MSN to invest: advanced e-mail and small-business services.

"There's a lot of demand for people who use Outlook as an e-mail client who don't have an Exchange server, whether it's a small business or you're an individual and you say I like Outlook, I love that experience, I'd love to be able to run Outlook but get the ability to have portable mail and mail I can get access from anywhere."

Mehdi told conference attendees that such a capability is "something that we're about to launch" and that the company will make it not jus part of its MSN Premium bundle of services, but also available as a standalone offering. This new service will be an "amazing opportunity for people to do premium e-mail in a way that you can't do and then there's a bunch of other services on top of that that we're looking at," he added.

Mehdi acknowledged that MSN has met with some criticism for not yet launching its expected MSN Music Service.

"We're taking our time and we're going to make a very simple, very easy to use service that will be, among other things, the best way to discover music online," Mehdi said. "And the discovery part is I think the part that's sort of untapped in the big opportunity and that will be coming out later this year."

Source: Microsoft-Watch

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