MSN Companion

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

~ the obituary ~

Around 1999 a lot of serious people convinced themselves that the personal computer was too complicated for ordinary households and that the future was a cheap appliance that only did the internet. Microsoft's entry in that race was the MSN Companion, unveiled at Comdex in November 1999 and delivered to buyers from 15 August 2000 in the shape of Compaq's iPAQ Home Internet Appliance.

The hardware was deliberately modest. A 10.1-inch flat panel at 800 by 600, an early build of Windows CE, Internet Explorer 4, a 56K modem, four USB ports and a wireless infrared keyboard with buttons printed for email and the web. No hard disk, so nothing to defragment and nothing to lose. Compaq's press release named the target customer plainly: people who wanted the internet without wanting a computer, and in practice that meant older buyers and first-timers.

Then there was the price. The device was $199 at retail, which in 2000 was extraordinary for anything with a screen attached. That number existed because of a $400 rebate, and the rebate existed because you signed up for three years of MSN Internet Access at $21.95 a month. Seven hundred and ninety dollars of committed dial-up, hidden behind a sticker that said $199. This was the standard trick of the era, the same one the free-PC companies ran, and it made the device useless the moment you wanted a different ISP.

eMachines announced its own model on 9 October 2000 with a larger monitor and a separate mouse, and a Compaq variant followed at the end of that month. Three manufacturers were building MSN Companions at once through the 2000 holiday season. That was as good as it got. Real PCs kept getting cheaper, broadband started arriving, and an appliance welded to one dial-up account looked worse every quarter. Microsoft ended support in October 2003.

~ the case file ~

~ the appliance year ~

The MSN Companion was one of a crowd. 3Com had Audrey, Netpliance had the i-Opener, Sony had the eVilla, Gateway and Virgin and half a dozen others had something. Every one of them assumed the same thing, that a family would pay for a second screen in the kitchen that could not do anything except browse. Every one of them died inside about three years, and most died faster than Microsoft's did.

The i-Opener survives in memory because people worked out how to install a hard drive and turn it into a cheap Linux box, which Netpliance then went to some trouble to stop. Audrey survives because it was beautiful enough to keep on a shelf. Nobody hacked the MSN Companion and nobody kept one for the design, so it is barely remembered at all.

~ the factory in manisa ~

Here is the detail that made me want to write this one. The third company building MSN Companion hardware, alongside Compaq and eMachines, was Vestel. Vestel is Turkish. It is a very large electronics manufacturer out of Manisa that has spent decades making televisions for other people's brand names across Europe, and in 2000 its American arm was turning out Microsoft's internet appliance: a 15-inch or 10-inch LCD, a PS/2 keyboard with a touchpad built in, 32MB of RAM plus 16MB of flash, and a 200MHz Geode.

None of these were sold here. In 2000 I was at home on a 56K modem doing exactly what the MSN Companion promised Americans they could do without a computer, except I was doing it on a computer, because that was the only way it worked in Turkey. Meanwhile a Turkish factory was assembling the stripped-down version for a country I had never been to. The product never crossed the border in the direction I could have used.

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