After fielding several complaints, MSN did a u-turn on this position and, the MSN Marketing Director said instead “we are going to support the latest versions of Opera and Mozilla so people will be able to get the MSN experience.” He added, however “the experience may be slightly degraded simply because they don’t support the standards we support closely, as far as the HTML standard in those browsers.” The World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) is the body responsible for developing universal web standards and MSN considers that browsers not supporting WC3 standards may render a second class experience of the MSN web site. Microsoft maintains that any problems with access are due to the fact that it wants to encourage people to use standard-compliant browsers.
The spurned browsers are frustrated that they run into trouble while MSN’s own IE easily reaches the web site, the increased dominance of IE would undoubtedly be beneficial to MSN at a time when the company hopes to expand in to the world of web services through its .Net software as a service strategy.