MSN

MSN is a web portal and related collection of Internet services and apps provided by Microsoft. The main home page provides news, weather, sports, finance and other content curated from hundreds of different sources that Microsoft has partnered with. MSN is based in the United States and offers international versions of its portal for dozens of countries around the world. Its dedicated app is currently available for iOS and Android systems.

The first version of MSN originally launched on August 24, 1995, alongside the release of Windows 95, as a subscription-based dial-up online service called The Microsoft Network; it later became an Internet service provider named MSN Dial-Up Internet Access. Also around this time, the company launched a new web portal named Microsoft Internet Start and set it as the default home page of Internet Explorer, its web browser. In 1998, Microsoft renamed and moved this web portal to the domain name msn.com, where it has remained since.

Microsoft subsequently used the "MSN" brand name for a wide variety of products and services over the years, notably MSN Hotmail (later Outlook.com), MSN Messenger (which was once synonymous with "MSN" in Internet slang), its web search engine (which became Bing), and several other rebranded and discontinued services. In 2014, Microsoft reworked and relaunched the MSN website and suite of apps offered. Following a partial rebranding of the website to Microsoft Start beginning in 2021, the company reversed course in 2024 and kept "MSN" as the name of the website.

From 1995 to 1998, the MSN.com domain was primarily used by Microsoft to promote The Microsoft Network as an online service and Internet service provider. During that period of time, MSN.com also offered a "Custom Start Page" and an Internet tutorial, but Microsoft's major public web portal of that era was known as "Microsoft Internet Start" and was located at home.microsoft.com.

Internet Start served as the default home page for Internet Explorer and offered basic information such as news, weather, sports, stocks, entertainment reports, links to other websites on the Internet, articles by Microsoft staff members, and software updates for Windows. Microsoft's original news website, MSNBC.com, which launched in 1996 (and was later divested by Microsoft as NBCNews.com), was also tied closely to the Internet Start portal.

In 1998, the largely underutilized "MSN.com" domain name was combined with Microsoft Internet Start and reinvented as both a web portal and as the brand for a family of sites produced inside Microsoft's Interactive Media Group. The new website put MSN in direct competition with sites such as Yahoo!, Excite, and Go Network. Because the new format opened up MSN's content to the world for free, the Internet service provider and subscription service were renamed to "MSN Internet Access" at that time (that service eventually became known as MSN Dial-Up Internet Access).

The relaunched MSN.com contained a whole family of sites, including original content, channels that were carried over from 'web shows' that were part of Microsoft's MSN 2.0 experiment with its Internet service provider in 1996–97, and new features that were rapidly added. MSN.com became the successor to the default Internet Explorer start page, as all of the previous "Microsoft Internet Start" website was merged with MSN.com.

Some of the original websites that Microsoft launched during that era remained active in some form for decades. Microsoft Investor, a business news and investments service that was once produced in conjunction with CNBC, became MSN Money; CarPoint, an automobile comparison and shopping service, became MSN Autos; and the Internet Gaming Zone, a website offering online casual games, became MSN Games. Other websites since divested by Microsoft include the travel website Expedia, the online magazine Slate, and the local event and city search website Sidewalk.com.