MSN China

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

~ the obituary ~

In Turkey, MSN meant the messenger. Nobody I knew ever used the word to mean a website. In China it meant a company: a joint venture registered in Shanghai, half owned by Microsoft and half by a state investment fund, with its own newsroom and a homepage that looked like nothing Microsoft shipped anywhere else.

Microsoft announced the venture with Shanghai Alliance Investment on 11 May 2005 and the portal went live two weeks later, on 26 May. The operating company was Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology and Microsoft held fifty percent of it. Every other national MSN was eventually folded onto the American page template in 2014. China was the exception that kept its own design and its own editorial staff, because the thing running it was not really Microsoft.

On 10 May 2016 Microsoft said the site was closing, and on 7 June cn.msn.com stopped being a portal. What went up in its place was a page of links to other Chinese websites with a Bing box on top of it.

The Chinese internet is one I have only ever read about. The years MSN China ran are exactly the years the letters MSN meant something in Turkey too, and the two things had almost nothing in common past the butterfly. Mine was a client sitting on a desktop. Theirs was a licensed local company with an editorial line.

~ the case file ~

~ the juku week ~

In November 2009 MSN China released a beta called MSN Juku. Reporters described it as a microblog built in the shape of Twitter, which the company denied. Twitter was blocked in China. Plurk, the Taiwanese microblog with the horizontal timeline, had been blocked that April.

On 14 December 2009 Plurk's official blog accused MSN China of lifting roughly eighty percent of its code, along with its stylesheets and interface. Microsoft said it was looking into the claim. The next day it confirmed the code had been copied and suspended Juku indefinitely, saying the work had been done by a Chinese contractor. The product lasted about six weeks. Plurk is still online in 2026.

~ what really happened ~

The 2016 announcement was dressed up as focus. Microsoft was putting its weight behind Windows 10 and cloud services and did not need a Chinese portal in the mix. The plainer version is that eleven years in, MSN China had not caught Sina or Sohu, and by then it hardly mattered which of them you were, because the phone was emptying out the whole portal category anyway.

Then Microsoft did something odd. Three months after saying it would shut the portal down, it sold it instead. The buyer was a firm founded in 2015 by Liu Zhenyu, who went by Anderson and had been MSN China's own general manager. Terms were not disclosed. The announcement of the death and the disposal of the body were separate events with a summer in between them.

~ the long tail ~

The other thing this joint venture was quietly holding up is easy to miss. Microsoft retired Windows Live Messenger worldwide in March 2013 and pushed everyone onto Skype, with a single exception. Mainland China kept it, because the local company was operating it there, and Chinese MSN Messenger survived until 31 October 2014, nineteen months past its own funeral. Users were handed to Skype with a two dollar calling coupon for their trouble.

The portal came back in 2018 under the msn.cn address. Type that today and you land on msn.com with a zh-cn path, which is the global MSN with a language setting applied. The newsroom is not there. The separate layout is not there. What survives of MSN China is a locale.

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