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What's the homepage on your PC? I did a dip-stick survey among nine friends. Four voted in favour of Google's search page, two had Yahoo! as their homepage, two still had the preset homepage of their PC maker and one had MSN (she also uses outlook.com as her primary email). No, she doesn't work for Microsoft.
While the sample size wasn't representative, what it did bring out was that it is difficult to pinpoint which website is better, as people have their own preferences. Now, my friend who loves Microsoft products because she says they are hassle-free (on her Mac; she'll kill me for saying this publicly) has a reason to rejoice. Microsoft last week unveiled a revamped MSN website (you can access it using the preview link on the regular MSN site).
While the news feed is busy, it isn't cluttered and fits in seamlessly with the look of my Windows 8.1 Pro desktop. No, it doesn't feature the Metro interface, but photos, news reports and updates under sports, health & fitness, money, travel and video, which you can edit and customise.
What is even more interesting is the "personal stripe", as Microsoft calls it. This is basically a band on top off the website which gives you one-click access to Outlook, Microsoft Office Online, OneNote, OneDrive, Bing Maps, Facebook, Twitter and Skype. I logged in to my Hotmail account (which has all my details saved) and I had all these services at the tip of my fingers (including maps for Delhi, where I am based). If only they had a tab for Flickr as well!
Just below the personal stripe, there are another eight tabs - news, entertainment, sports, money, health & fitness, food & drink, travel and video. Microsoft has tied up with some Indian broadcasters and newspapers for feeds.
Under the News tab, one finds sections such as headlines, sports, entertainment, tech & science and business, besides photos. Another interesting part are the feeds from news websites featured on this site. The site looks pretty but if I wanted a quick fix on news, I'd probably visit Google News.
The entertainment tab looks exciting with lots of pictures, but I was disappointed after I clicked on the movie review of Finding Fanny as it didn't mention the film critic's name and had problems in formatting. Yahoo! possibly scores in this respect.
I loved the sports section because one could check out fixtures and results at a glance in a neat interface, while the money section had clean interface. I loved the 3D Human Body section under health & fitness tab, which seems a decent upgrade.
A Microsoft release says the new website has the "latest statistics on over 200 global sports leagues, reviews of over 1.5 million bottles of wine, to over 300,000 gorgeously photographed recipes". I heartily agree with the "gorgeously photographed recipes"; they had me salivating. Plus, it also features helpful short videos and a button to directly add ingredients of a recipe to your shopping list.
I also liked the travel section with the breathtaking photos and the handy flight and hotel search, while the video section mostly had videos of current news events. The website, for now, is devoid of ads but for those from Microsoft; this is a welcome change but I guess there will targeted ads once this interface becomes the default one.
In conclusion, what will finally make or break the website is when they implement phase II, that is, their cross-platform apps. If they are as good as Google, they will have a winner on their hands.
