Microsoft Overhauls MSN, Rebrands Bing Mobile Apps

Microsoft (MSFT) has overhauled its MSN portal to reflect its mobile-first, cloud-first initiative, moving to integrate the site with other services such as email, OneDrive and OneNote and repurposing it into a go-to landing page for anything and everything users want.

The vendor also has tied together Bing and MSN, rebranding Bing mobile apps such as News, Sports, Travel, Weather and Finance to MSN and segmenting them by Windows Phone, iOS and Android platforms. A new suite of MSN apps for iOS and Android will be released in a few months to add to Windows and Windows Phone versions.

“We have rebuilt MSN from the ground up for a mobile-first, cloud-first world,” Brian MacDonald, Microsoft Information and Content Experiences corporate vice president, wrote in a blog post.

“The new MSN brings together the world’s best media sources along with data and services to enable users to do more in News, Sports, Money, Travel, Food & Drink, Health & Fitness, and more,” he said. “It focuses on the primary digital daily habits in people’s lives and helps them complete tasks across all of their devices. Information and personalized settings are roamed through the cloud to keep users in the know wherever they are.”

MSN for the most part had been back-burnered in favor of Bing and Windows Live but the new effort is intended to bring it back as a prominent portal. The make-over, which aims to present a cleaner design to make the site easier for users to navigate, integrates Facebook, Twitter, Office 365 and Skype, and offers productivity tools such as shopping lists, a savings calculator, a symptom checker and a 3D body explorer, among information items.

In addition, Microsoft no longer is producing news and features content in-house, instead partnering with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CNN, AOL and Condé Nast in the United States; The Yomiuri Shimbun and The Asahi Shimbun in Japan; Sky News, The Guardian and the Telegraph in the United Kingdom; NDTV and Hindustan Times in India; and Le Figaro and Le Monde in France to deliver global content.

A beta launch is available now at preview.msn.com. The full Monty will be kicked off before the end of the year, according to a Microsoft spokesperson.