New MSN Outshines AOL By Walter S. Mossberg
24 October 2002
The Wall Street Journal
TEN YEARS ago this month, I became the first national columnist to recommend an obscure, fledgling online service called America Online over its larger rivals. In that column, I noted that AOL had just 200,000 members at the time, but I called it "the sophisticated wave of the future among such services."
In the years since, I have consistently backed AOL as it grew to 35 million members in the face of sneering comments from the techie class and predictions of its doom. I stood by AOL because it focused squarely on nontechnical mainstream users, and because its main rival now, the Microsoft Network, or MSN, with about 8.7 million members today, was markedly inferior.
In the past few years, however, AOL has seemed to lose its way. While its mainstream users became more adept at going online and more reliant on e-mail, the service stubbornly retained its simplistic e-mail system and one-size-fits-all Welcome Screen. Worse, it treated members as little more than sales prospects. Meanwhile, MSN got better and better.
Now, both services have released their latest versions. After testing these two for weeks, I believe MSN has now surpassed AOL. MSN 8 offers a better online experience than AOL 8.0, in my view, even for the average, mainstream users to whom AOL has always catered.
The new MSN gives its members much more personalization, much better e-mail tools, better spam-fighting weapons, better parental controls, better personal-finance tools, and an overall cleaner, fresher look and feel. And it does all this without adding complexity or being hard to use. Plus, at $21.95 a month, MSN is nearly $2 a month less than AOL, which charges $23.90.
AOL chose to focus AOL 8.0 on what it calls "self-expression" -- mostly cosmetic touches, such as allowing members to choose wallpaper for the service, or cartoonish themes and sounds for their instant-messaging windows. Modest improvements were made to AOL's e-mail interface, but it still lags behind almost every other e-mail program and real personalization is still absent.
I don't say this with glee. AOL has been a good counterweight to Microsoft's monopolies in operating systems and office suites. And it isn't a clean win for MSN or a black-and-white choice for consumers. AOL still beats MSN in a number of areas, especially in its great depth of so-called community features -- chat rooms, discussion forums and a huge body of instant-messaging users.
Not only that, but in recent months AOL has awakened from its long coma and has been scrambling to shed the anticonsumer legacy of the past few years. It deserves immense credit for announcing last week that it is killing off most of its obnoxious pop-up ads, a move that forced MSN to do the same. And AOL has a long list of added features and improvements ready to be deployed over the next six or seven months, long before its next big annual release in the fall of 2004.
So, I'm not trying to encourage a mass exodus from AOL to MSN. But I do believe that MSN has pulled clearly ahead in so many crucial areas that it is now the leader. Here are some of the key features in the new versions.
Personalization: AOL still operates on a broadcast mentality. It pushes nearly the same content at everybody. In 8.0, AOL boasts that it offers a choice of six Welcome Screens, each aimed at a broad segment of the population. But these screens differ little and can't be personalized with content you prefer. For instance, it takes three clicks from the welcome screen just to get to your stock portfolio. Yet, it's easy to find stupid polls asking members about pop culture or news events. There is a My AOL screen, but it's hard to find and you can't substitute it for the canned one.
By contrast, MSN has created a rich, highly personalizable My MSN screen, and you can choose to substitute it for the service's general opening screen. On the My MSN screen, you can see your portfolio immediately, along with scores from your favorite sports teams, and headlines on the topics and from the sources you choose. One nice touch: When you log onto MSN, a female voice greets you by name and appropriate time of day, such as "Good Morning, Walt," unless your name is too hard for a computer to pronounce.
E-mail: This is the killer app online, and AOL still has a crude, simplistic e-mail interface. You can't see any part of an e-mail until you open it, which is tedious with a lot of messages. You can't easily sort your e-mail into folders, or search your mailbox for specific senders or subjects or text, or do lots of other things that even the simplest, free e-mail programs allow.
MSN's e-mail module is vastly superior. It has an optional "preview pane," so you can see what's in each e-mail without opening it. It has visible folders into which you can drag e-mail. It has a good e-mail search function, and even a very cool system for laying out photos you can insert in e-mail.
Antispam: Both services try to block spam at the server level, and both kill a tremendous amount of it, yet members' mailboxes are still filled with the stuff. AOL 8.0 has no antispam filters the user can invoke. All it allows you to do is report spam to the service and sort your mailbox so you can see the mail from people in your address book at the top of the list, or see mail only from people in your address book.
MSN has a sophisticated spam-filtering system. In my tests, it caught about 90% of my junk mail and dumped it into a junk-mail folder. Spam that is missed can be labeled as junk and sent to the folder with the click of a button.
Parental controls: This was an AOL strength, but MSN is now better. The AOL parental controls are good but pretty general, mostly based on age. MSN lets parents set very detailed controls. You can block or allow specific Web sites, or dozens of categories of sites. You can also block songs with explicit lyrics, receive a report on your child's online activities and allow the child to contact you, even if you're at work, to request a specific exemption.
Companion software: AOL has a new, floating miniwindow, called the Companion, which can be seen even if the AOL software isn't active on your screen. It tells you if you have an e-mail or instant message, and can report on things like headlines and weather. MSN has a much richer, nicer optional add-on called the Dashboard, which you can customize with content and links, even a favorite photo. It can appear within the MSN service or can float on your PC desktop.
Extras: AOL has more internal content areas, but MSN this year has added, for members only, a souped-up online version of Microsoft's Encarta Encyclopedia, and online versions of its Money and its Picture-It photo-editing software. MSN's Money Plus includes free online bill-paying and a more-sophisticated, better-organized set of features than AOL offers, much of it drawn from MSN's well-regarded Money Web site.
Meanwhile, AOL has greatly improved its search function, using Google as the search engine, and has a new feature called Match Chat, which helps members find chat rooms that match their interests. AOL also now has an automatic reconnect feature to get you back online when you get knocked off. And it lets you listen to the same online song as an instant-messaging buddy. MSN lets you tour the Web in tandem with an instant-messaging buddy.
Look and Feel: Many of AOL's pages are showing their age. They are cramped and unattractive. MSN has a fresher, more attractive look. You can hide its main toolbar, or change the size of the toolbar icons and add or remove text labels.
AOL users who are happy with the service or have solid AOL dial-up numbers in their area or love the AOL chat rooms and forums, should probably stay put and wait for AOL's promised future improvements in areas such as e-mail and personalization.
For those who do want to switch to MSN, Microsoft includes a service that can transfer your AOL e-mail, address book and calendar entries. The switching service will even notify people in your address book of your new MSN address and cancel your AOL account, if you like. You can even keep your AOL buddy list, because AOL has a free program, AOL Instant Messenger, that allows folks who aren't AOL members to do instant messaging with its subscribers.
Both companies know this fight isn't over. Microsoft is displaying its famous propensity to keep improving when it's behind in market share. At the same time, the whole climate at AOL headquarters is more alive and creative than it has been in years. The company doesn't want to share the fate of the online dinosaurs it began slaying a decade ago. The winner in all this competition is the consumer, and that's a good thing. |
