MSN premiered in 1995 and shipped with
Windows 95 as an initiative to try and get some of the market share that
AOL had recently gained. At the time, there were many national
internet serivce providers who targeted the new Windows platform. Many
services were packed-in, and many met with limited
success. The most notable flop was
WOW (
World of Windows, as I recall), a service by the makers of
CompuServe.
The original MSN interface was dark and
Encarta like in its setup. They tried for
desktop integration of the
Internet, which, to this day, has not happened entirely.
Most recently, the
interface has been cleaned up and trimmed down into
MSN Explorer, an easier to use, almost
OS X Aqua like program. It includes and leverages heavily the MSN
Passport system.