MSN Logo Makeover

 Aiming to stay relevant, Microsoft is introducing a new look for its MSN.com home page.

Although MSN gets far less attention than the company's Bing or Windows Live efforts, the home page remains an important economic engine for Microsoft's online business, as well as a significant source of search traffic for Bing. 

We believe it's an important asset for Microsoft," said MSN general manager Bob Visse. The site is still the top portal in about 25 of the 46 markets, with about 600 million unique users globally and 100 million in the U.S, where it trails Yahoo in popularity. The redesign, which has been in the works for months, bears quite a bit of resemblance to the one that Microsoft had been testing in France. Microsoft late Tuesday began rolling out the new MSN home page (click for preview), which it says will become widely available in the U.S. early in 2010. With its new look, the home page has about half as many links as the previous incarnation, focusing instead on a few categories, such as video, news, shopping, and search. The old site had dozens of text links at the top and bottom of the page for everything from horoscopes to white pages to a free trial of MSN's dial-up Internet service.

Read more: news.cnet