Back from the dead, sort of: Microsoft rebrands Bing apps to MSN

We’re willing to bet that, by now, you’d probably forgotten about MSN or assumed that Microsoft had quietly buried it somewhere in the deep dark woods of the Pacific Northwest. It turns out though that the Redmond-based giant still has plans for the brand.

In an official blog post, the company announced that it would be rebranding several of it Bing apps as MSN products across iOS and Android.

Alongside the newly rebranded apps, Microsoft is also launching a new version of MSN as part of its mobile-first, cloud-first strategy.

The new version, which is available for preview from today, highlights a number of services from Microsoft, as well as from popular social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

There’s also news from a variety of sources and productivity tools like shopping lists, a savings calculator, a symptom checker, and a 3D body explorer.

The fact that your can access Outlook and various other cloud services from the homepage makes it seem like a cleaner version of iGoogle which, in case you’ve forgotten, it killed unceremoniously.

That said, there are still plenty of people around the world who use MSN (think of all the people for whom Internet Explorer is the only browser they’ve ever experienced).

It’s still unclear however exactly why Microsoft chose to rebrand the Bing apps and what that in turn means for the Bing brand as a whole.