MSN China?

I’d heard from “insiders” at Microsoft’s Shanghai “MSN” company that they were working on something “big,” but they refused to reveal details. Today, it was finally unveiled. www.msn.com.cn… Overall feeling: disappointed, very disappointed. Wanted to write something critical, but Googled it and found the Internet already flooded with complaints. No need to add more. Reposting one article that大概 (roughly) captures my thoughts. Also, some classmates are going to intern at MSN — wonder what they’ll do…

The legendary MSN China finally lifted its veil. The homepage lists a bunch of unrelated sections: News & Entertainment, Interactive Community, Finance, Automotive, Digital Entertainment, Shopping, Games, Ringtone Downloads, English Class — completely unclear who it’s for. Such a hodgepodge, and there’s a “Set MSN as my homepage” link in the bottom-left corner — pretty pleased with themselves.

The layout follows the pre-redesign MSN English homepage format, not the current W3C-compliant one. Looks terrible in Firefox. Also, the well-received My MSN is gone. If not for the butterfly logo in the top-left, I couldn’t tell this MSN China has anything to do with MSN. Almost all of MSN’s original good content has disappeared from MSN China. Now Microsoft can responsibly say: this is a purely Chinese website.

More hilariously, MSN in China has become one family with Yahoo — its search isn’t powered by Microsoft’s hard-earned MSN Search, but by 3721+Yisou.

Spent a lot of money, put in a lot of effort, pulled a lot of strings, laid a lot of groundwork — and what they rolled out with such fanfare is nothing but a gaudy piece of trash.