All it takes is a few weeks surfing the landscape of the Microsoft Network with a multimedia personal computer running Windows 95. Then the enormous power of wedding an on-line service with an operating system becomes abundantly clear.
MSN, as it is better known, is a relative tyke right now, with a mere fraction of the numbers of customers now using CompuServe, America Online and Prodigy. But signs are strong that MSN is about to grow into an 800-pound on-line gorilla. It’s cheap, powerful and coming soon to a desktop near you.
You must have Windows 95 on your machine to get the MSN to work, and the company refuses to make a version for Windows 3.1 because much of the new on-line service’s features require 32-bit data transfer and versions below Windows 95 operate at 16 bits. Also, for those who have made the 32-bit plunge, the MSN experience begins with two icons that automatically appear on the main screen–called the desktop–when Windows 95 is running. One is dubbed The Internet and the other Microsoft Network.
Clicking on the Microsoft Network or MSN icon dials your modem and hooks you up via a local number to what at first blush looks like just another on-line service.
But, if you have any e-mail waiting, the software calls up a part of the operating system called the Microsoft Exchange that amounts to a control center for e-mail, faxing and, in office environments, the local area network.
The exchange’s e-mail feature is much like those on America Online, CompuServe or Prodigy, which means that in addition to just passing along words, a user can attach things like pictures, sounds or fully formatted word processing documents to each note.
And here is where a new user gets a first glimmer of the significance of making an on-line service part of the core software that governs input and output, which, after all, is the function of any operating system.
A document written in Microsoft Word complete with embedded sounds, photos and even video clips can be attached to e-mail and, when the recipient opens the e-mail, there is an icon for the document.
By dragging that icon onto the desktop, the recipient can then click on it, which will call up the Microsoft Word software and read, view and listen to anything included.
All of these things can be done on competing on-line services, but each of them requires numerous extra steps, including calling up whatever software you need on your machine to deal with attached files and then loading those files into the software.
The idea behind MSN is to reduce the on-line experience to an environment like a regular Windows computer screen, where every feature is marked by an icon that is clicked to activate it.
Thus, when a user moves from e-mail to the rest of the MSN, each category is represented by the same sort of folder icons as are used elsewhere in Windows to represent files and directories.
So starting with a top directory of 16 categories, a user works down a hierarchy of subdirectories, extracting whatever is desired along the way in the form of files that can be read, viewed or heard using Microsoft software on the user’s own computer.
The starting categories are very much like those offered by other on-line providers, including Arts & Entertainment, Home & Family, Health & Fitness, Business & Finance, etc.
But each of these areas is represented by an icon of a folder just like the folder icons elsewhere on the computer representing directories.
When you find something you want, such as a picture, a text file, a song or whatever else catches your eye, you can move the icon for that feature onto your desktop.
In subsequent sessions, you simply click on that added icon and the computer automatically dials up the Microsoft Network and takes you to that precise spot.
One of the best applications of this little trick is to move icons for Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia and Microsoft Bookshelf, a collection of a half dozen major reference books including the World Almanac and the American Heritage Dictionary, onto your desktop.
Then, when a question arises during the course of a computing session, you can simply click an icon and do the looking up.
In time trials for this review I was able to click on the icon for Encarta and call up a specific encyclopedia story complete with pictures and sounds in just over one minute, about the length of time it would have taken me to find a CD-ROM, open the jewel case, load it into my CD-ROM reader and call up the same encyclopedia.
Thus MSN adds a virtually endless suite of powers to your desktop computer that is limited only by whatever the huge software company eventually adds to its content.
And right now, the content on MSN is markedly less robust than the offerings of the already established Big Three services.
The news mainly comes from UPI news briefs, and the service to date lacks the presence of major newspapers and mass circulation magazines in its content.
But that clearly will change in the future. Already MSN has 200 companies sponsoring on-line areas, and these include Charles Schwab & Co. Inc., Federal Express Corp., Fidelity Management, the National PTA, Senior Net United Airlines and USA Today. The latter, however, supplies only limited content from the newspaper.
In each case one clicks a folder icon to get to the area. Once there you can do things like track a Federal Express package, view a satellite map of the weather over Chicago, buy a block of Microsoft stock or send some e-mail to your grandmother.
And one of the things that this e-mail can hold is the icon that will lead to a selected service.
You can, for example, send an icon for the Federal Express area of MSN to that selfsame grandmother. Once the icon is on her machine, she could then use it to find out why the package of cookies she sent you didn’t arrive.
The ability to move iconized data files across cyberspace thus offers a major new tool in communicating about the ins and outs of the on-line landscape.
This is particularly noticeable when you click on the other icon, the one marked “The Internet.” This summons up the Microsoft Internet Explorer, World Wide Web software prepared in cooperation with Naperville-based Spyglass Inc.
The Web, of course, gives MSN users access far beyond just Microsoft’s own resources and the Explorer software compares very favorably with the Netscape software that is much more popular among Internet initiates.
When running the Explorer on Windows 95, you can move to the Web’s tens of thousands of home pages and the software does things like play video clips, lets you listen to on-line radio broadcasts, shows pictures and, of course downloads text files as diverse as the Koran and the latest UPI news brief.
And, because you’re running in Windows 95, when you find a home page you particularly like you can simply push your right mouse button and create an icon–called a “shortcut”–for that page.
Then, when you want to go there again, you click on the icon and it makes your computer dial up the Microsoft Network and then call up the browser and takes you to exactly that page.
Of course you also can send that same icon in e-mail to anybody you wish.
Pricing for the network currently is $4.95 per month for a standard plan that includes three hours of usage. Extra hours are $2.50 apiece. A frequent-user plan costs $20 per month for 20 hours and then $2 for every hour extra.
Company officials say they expect to have 1 million customers by August of 1996, though currently there are fewer than 500,000 users enrolled.
At $4.95, everybody with a computer running Windows 95 should at least take a look for a sample month. I’m betting most will be hooked on the spot.
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Tribune computer writer James Coates can be reached via the Internet at jcoates@msn.com
