Word: msn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Along with its player roster. Take, for instance, MSN.com home page of the famously underperforming Microsoft Network. Later this year--if the Feds don't quash his online ambitions first--Bill Gates will launch Microsoft Start, MSN's reincarnation as a portal site. Microsoft's early Web efforts may have been feeble, but that doesn't mean the Gen-X millionaires at Yahoo and Excite won't be looking over their shoulder. "It's early in the game," says Yang. And Bill Gates tends to win in the late rounds...
...topple IBM's hardware hegemony, but the market proved a far better Big Blue buster than the feds. And two years ago, the irresistible force in online services was supposed to be the Microsoft Network, which, like this year's Explorer, came bundled into every last Windows machine. Instead, MSN floundered and AOL cleaned its clock. Microsoft may yet get its comeuppance (Java, anyone?), but digital history suggests it will come not from Washington but from some hitherto obscure geek who--just like young Bill, once upon a time--shatters the old mold with a better idea...
...MSN has struggled since the day it was born. It was conceived as a proprietary online service, a la AOL, then hastily recast just before launch as a Web service much of whose programming was available only to subscribers for a fee. Since then, the tight-knit community of Internet content developers--on whom MSN is dependent for its programming--has been retailing stories of editorial confusion, marketing failures and internal reorganizations...
...Talk site) to inside-the-Beltway political analysis (Michael Kinsley's highbrow journal Slate). But its haste to build an online empire has left Microsoft throwing lucrative contracts at pretty much any Web developer who knew how to work a mouse, hoping it would create something--anything--for MSN. A Web novice tells of walking into a meeting to pitch ideas and being asked instead for his company's business plan. "I walked out and thought, 'That was weird,'" he recalls. "I'd never been to a meeting where they asked, essentially, 'Are you guys for sale...
...with few exceptions--the popular Sidewalk and Internet Gaming Zone sites chief among them--MSN has failed to attract a mass audience. MSN executives have been shocked by how rarely customers stray beyond plain-vanilla E-mail and online access into the premium programming that was supposed to be the network's drawing card. According to an internal memo distributed last spring, the pay area's most popular channel at the time, Daily Disney Blast, was attracting a dismal 6,000 hits a week...