Microsoft Start

» see microsoftstart.msn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i used msn from 1998. the chat client, the homepage, the messenger, the butterfly logo. by the time microsoft started calling the news surface "microsoft start" in 2021 i was 37, the brand had thirty years of muscle memory in turkey, and a renaming announcement was not going to undo it. so i kept calling it msn even when the tab said start. apparently so did everyone else, because three years later microsoft gave up and put the butterfly back.

microsoft start launched on september 7 2021 as a personalized news feed using machine-learning to surface stories. it replaced msn.com on the web and msn news on mobile. edge and windows 11 wired the widgets panel into it. on paper it was the same kind of move google made when it killed igoogle to push google news.

the difference: msn is one of the oldest brands microsoft ever shipped. the butterfly logo dates to 1995. msn carried hotmail, messenger, gaming zone and a dialup service across two decades of consumer software. asking the user to forget msn for a name like "start" was asking a lot from a brand that already had its own gravity.

~ the dossier ~

~ what microsoft tried to do ~

the 2021 pitch was that msn was a portal brand from the y2k era and people wanted personalized feeds, not a homepage. microsoft start was supposed to be the modern face: machine-learning news, a card-based mobile app, deep integration with edge so the new tab page would feel like a feed. internally it was the news vertical at microsoft trying to compete with google discover and apple news.

numbers existed. by 2023 microsoft was quoting hundreds of millions of monthly users for the surface, partly because every fresh windows 11 install pointed the widgets panel and the edge new tab at it by default. that is the kind of distribution most rebrands would call a win.

~ the actual end ~

in november 2024 the start website began redirecting to msn.com. the apps got a new icon: the old butterfly, redrawn in microsoft's fluent style. windows central reported the rebrand on november 11 and microsoft confirmed it was "unifying our content services under the msn brand." in plain english: the start name never stuck and the msn name never died, so they merged the two by killing the newer one.

three years. that is the entire lifespan of microsoft start as a public brand. the technology underneath did not die, just the label on top. msn rose from a rebrand that was supposed to bury it. that is its own kind of obituary.

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