Forum Moderators: bakedjake
Will it ever happen? If so, when? What is your take on the future of MSN?
At least, it's about 2-3 years away, if they *really* push, and have a crack team working on it, perhaps they can come up with something viable in 2 years or a little less.
If they ship something out that sucks, then people won't use it - to come up with something spectacular, and different, that people will *want* to use, will be tough, at best.
Given their bent to over commercialization of their search results in the past, and their statements through the last few years on satisfaction gowing up with an ever increasing monetization of results, I seriously doubt they'll ever return a product to compete with Google or Teoma.
something spectacular, and different, that people will *want* to use
I hardly think that will be MSN's goal. They have got millions of desktops/browsers out there. Any okish SE incorporated in the desktop would suffice a lot of average users' needs. Maybe quality-concious serious searchers would take the effort to go to a non-built-in SE. (remember netscape?)
Don't know about you, but even with a family *full* of computer novices, the second that something "better" comes along, every one of them will switch to "that" whatever it may be, from Google.
Yes, some people in my family use MSN on occassion, but most of them use it to find Google ;)
These are "inexperienced users" who "don't know better". If people who don't know better rely on the judgement of family & friends on "what to use for search" it won't matter how much MSN ties their engine into software, platform, OS, etc - people will just start using it, to find their engine of choice before actually performing a search.
