Replies

Well said.

MSN is a joke, on par with Netscape's home page, (the irony I'm sure will be lost on Quasimodo), chock full of cyber-waste best suited to People magazine or Tiger Beat.

I'm on a dialup, and I don't typically bookmark clutter aimed at the MassMind, much less make it a home page. (Google is mine, by the way).

For the record, I have a Hotmail account, (and Yahoo), and being on a dialup use Firefox to block a lot of the clutter.

Gates and crew could use some tips from this site:

http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/

"MSN is a joke, on par with Netscape's home page"

MSN is the # 2 web property on the entire planet.
No amount of angst and anguish and bitterness and pain from you is going to change the facts. :)
All you are going to get is take your blood pressure right up.
Not good for you.

What's truly unfortunate is that Microsoft did actually built it properly at http://search.msn.com, but it's hidden so 90% of their websites users will never find it. If they had scrapped their "new and improved" msn.com homepage in favor of the streamlined one at search.msn.com, I might have given more credence to their efforts. Heck, they could even have their "news" link go to their old page for the people that want it, while giving most of their searchers a simple, fast interface.

The problem is that MS, like most huge corporations, is actually run by program and department managers with competing views of what "should" be offered in their products, and just about everything they crank out is a compromise. I'm sure that there were people at MS who wanted the search.msn.com interface to be the default, but I'd bet good money that they were shot down by the departments responsible for collecting and publishing those "news" articles, and from the ad sales department who wanted their ads front and center. Rather than look at the best solution for the user, they were interested in preserving their own glory and departmental importance.

Google doesn't have that problem, and their management is far more centralized so these types of fubars don't happen. MS needs to take a page from the Google playbook and realize that they need to put the USER first, not their employees or profits. Built it, and the users will come. Built it right, and the users will come with profit. As they have built it, I don't see MSN search being noted for anything other than an "Also Ran" in the Search wars (which is tragic, because the search localization feature is actually pretty nifty).