MSN began as a dial-up service launched alongside Windows 95
On August 24, 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95 and, with it, The Microsoft Network, a paid dial-up online service. Three decades later MSN is a free news portal. In between, the three letters were stamped on Hotmail, a messaging app so popular its name became slang, and the search engine now called Bing.
In its first years MSN was a subscription service and then an internet provider. Microsoft's real public portal at the time was Microsoft Internet Start, set as the default home page of Internet Explorer and tied to the MSNBC.com news site launched in 1996. In 1998 the company merged Internet Start into the little-used msn.com address and relaunched it as a free portal to compete with Yahoo!, Excite and Go Network, renaming the paid access service accordingly.
The late 1990s brought rapid expansion. Microsoft Investor became MSN Money, CarPoint turned into MSN Autos, and the Internet Gaming Zone became MSN Games; the travel site Expedia and the magazine Slate were also part of the family before being sold off. MSN Search and the Passport single sign-in both arrived in 1999, and the butterfly logo debuted on February 14, 2000. By May 2005 MSN was the second most visited portal in the United States, with 23.2 percent, behind Yahoo!.
Then Microsoft started peeling services away. From 2005 many moved under a new Windows Live label: Hotmail went on to become Outlook.com, Messenger was later folded into Skype, and MSN Search passed through Live Search on its way to Bing. MSN itself narrowed to news, entertainment and everyday topics, and in 2012 the long partnership with MSNBC ended when Microsoft sold its remaining stake to NBCUniversal.
A full redesign on September 30, 2014, dropped original content in favour of editors repackaging material from partner outlets, and closed the customisable My MSN page. Traffic rose by 10 million daily visitors within two months. Microsoft began shifting the site to a Microsoft Start brand in 2021, then reversed course in November 2024 and restored the MSN name.
Source: MSN
