Word: msn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...more than six months, a team at Microsoft has been working on its own search engine/-directory, code-named Yukon. The company should have a beta version up by October, with a launch date of January. Yukon will most probably be released directly on the Web, not on MSN, the company's members-only Net service meant to compete with AOL. Rumors of BILL GATES' foray into the Web's most popular genre have been floating around Silicon Valley for months, but until now no one knew whether he planned to buy an existing engine or create...
...newspaper business have been coming back from trips to Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, in terror. There is no hope for us, my pals say. Already Bill Gates has sent out advance teams to hover like those spaceships in Independence Day over 10 major U.S. cities. In each, Microsoft Network (MSN) employees are setting up regional Websites that will publish local listings of movies, concerts, restaurant reviews and so forth, draining readers and ads from the local newspapers and eventually turning them into dust. Two dozen other glitzy programs, some suspiciously magazine-like, will finish off the rest...
...office with a window, so you can't tell the bosses from the people who do the real work. In one of them I meet a man who wears glasses so splattered with color they look like Jackson Pollock's safety goggles. This is Bob Bejan, executive producer of MSN, who began his career as a hoofer on Broadway in A Chorus Line. Later he produced interactive movies in which the audience dictated the course of action. Now he's the guy who "green-lights" MSN's "shows." That's what they call Websites here. Shows...
...that's possible on the Internet," Bejan says, noting that while 30 million people now have access to the Web, "we want to bring the next 10 million online." For the next six hours, I get a glimpse of how. Hundreds of people are involved in creating MSN's shows, from the typographers who choose the fonts to the musicians--"the MSN orchestra!" someone jokes--who write the theme songs. Teams of market researchers measure what's working and what's not. Shows that don't make the cut will be replaced by others already in the works...
...engineering isn't art, and I think my friends may be overreacting. Too much of MSN's stuff is slick but unexciting. The best thing I saw was a little Gumby-like character that a kid on the tech side had built out of clay at home for fun and then modeled in his workstation, making it do amazing tricks. The day Microsoft figures out how to get that thing out of the kid's computer and onto the Net is the day my friends should start looking for a new line of work...