MSN searches for leverage

Q&A Can Microsoft's MSN Web portal become all things to all people? Talking to Yusuf Mehdi, the Microsoft executive in charge of figuring out the company's portal strategy, you get the feeling that's certainly no stretch.

Mehdi, who recently launched MSN Video and MSN Premium Internet access, also has plans to incorporate a next-generation search engine, a music download application service similar to Apple Computer's iTunes and a social-networking service. And that's just what we know for now.

Mehdi, who has quickly climbed the management ranks since joining the company 12 years ago, earned his stripes during the Internet browser wars of the 1990s, when he played a major role in helping Microsoft's Internet Explorer outstrip rival Netscape Navigator.

A big part of Mehdi's current work is figuring out how to capitalise on the resurgence of the online advertising market. MSN wants to roughly quadruple its share of the total media-spending business in the next five years. Founded in 1993, the MSN business turned a profit for the first time in last year's third quarter, thanks largely to the hot sector of search engine marketing. Including commercial search, MSN's sales from Internet ads were $1bn (£0.55bn) last year, the company said.

ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com caught up with Mehdi at MSN's recent advertising summit, where he was playing host to 500 of Microsoft's top customers.

Q: What is your time line for developing or introducing a new search engine?
A: The first thing we have to do is to get out to a beta. Within the next 12 months, we will have released a first version.

And what about advertising technologies for search?
We have a big investment in advertising technologies for our brand advertising business. We run our own ad server and we serve billions of ads a day. We have those two services today and are looking at how to expand them. It is natural that you would say we should make it simple for people to be able to buy all their advertising together with a good partnership. We are evaluating options about whether we should do more in that specific space or not.