14 DAY TRIAL // If you thought that the shuffling of services between MSN and Live, plus/minus Windows, was over think again. Microsoft is claiming that the transition was catalyzed by the necessity to “better align products and sites focused on content and community, QnA has moved from the Live Search organization into MSN.” However, reading between the lines, it's obvious that QnA was nothing short of exiled from Live Search with the team disbanded, and some members moving to MSN along with fresh additions, and some left behind to tend to the company's search engine. The MSN QnA team even got a new lead.
“After years working as an Executive Producer, Manager and Community Promotions Director for a large Internet company, I joined Microsoft in the Silicon Valley to continue working in the Web Industry and remain in the Bay Area. That was 5 years ago. Since then, I’ve shipped MSN Radio Applications, TV Listings and Recording Services and Media Discovery features. And, for the past 2 years, I’ve been leading teams developing community features for MSN. I see QnA as a fabulous community to be part of MSN. Community is important to me. I’m eager to explore how we can continue to evolve and improve the experience in ways that help grow a healthy, vibrant community,” revealed the new MSN QnA boss.
According to the Redmond company, now is the perfect time for the transition of QnA to MSN from Live Search. Moving forward, the focus with QnA is to engage the existing MSN community to greater levels than before. Microsoft is in fact promising nothing short of the future of QnA with the move to MSN, indicating that it is looking to deliver new ways for members to engage each other via QnA. The change will not be instantaneous. For the time being the service remains in Beta and under Live Search, but over the course of the next months changes will begin to be implements, and QnA will also be rebranded under MSN.
“Even more exciting, with our next release, you’ll see a change to how QnA handles “Conversational” vs. “Informational” questions. Over the past few months, we’ve been testing how best to include conversational questions in the QnA experience and started the program by requiring the conversational tag. We’ve heard from many of you that you like the change in QnA policy to accept conversational questions but you don’t like having to manually add the tag. You spoke. We listened. The QnA team is currently working on the changes so stay tuned for the next QnA release,”the MSN QnA boss added.