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While it ended up ditching the 8.5 moniker, Microsoft rolled out its interim upgrade to its Internet service on Wednesday.
Microsoft is billing the updated bits as "MSN 8 with enhancements." Among the updates: More junk-mail filtering; additional parental controls; and new monitoring tools for tracking email storage size and message size.

Existing MSN 8 subscribers will receive automatically the enhancements "through idle bandwidth while they are online," according to Microsoft. MSN subscribers using older versions will obtain the enhancements on a CD, which Microsoft will mail to them.

AOL launched its rival interim update, called AOL 8.0 Plus, at the end of March. Microsoft has been beta testing the so-called MSN 8.5 release for several months.

Now that the interim updates are out, both MSN and AOL are on the road to launching their full-fledged platform updates that will be geared more toward broadband users.

AOL late last month released a first beta of AOL 9.0 (code-named "Blue Hawaii"). Microsoft has been talking up its MSN Messenger 6.0 instant messaging upgrade that will be part of MSN 9.0, but has not released beta code yet. It's unclear if the two rivals will launch their next-generation platforms late this year or early next.

MSN officials have dropped some hints about what Microsoft has up its sleeve for its 9.0 release. At Goldman Sachs' fourth annual Internet conference in Las Vegas in late May, Yusuf Mehdi, corporate VP of MSN personal services and business, talked up some work MSN has been doing on its next version, especially in the area of premium subscription services.

Microsoft already has dabbled with online subscriptions. With MSN 8.0, it made certain value-added services, such as souped-up versions of Money, Encarta and PictureIt! available only to subscribers. In recent weeks, Microsoft has also decided to make some of its formerly free services (such as MSN Photo and MSN Calendar) available to subscribers only. So it's likely thing like photo sharing and calendar synchronization will become premium services as of MSN 9.0.

There will be other MSN 9.0 premium services as well. Expect MSN 9.0 to be a bring-your-own-access (BYOA) release only and to be focused almost exclusively on broadband. Among the potential premium services on tap: some kind of DRM-protected online music/video service, advanced spam filtering, and e-mail collaboration tools, Mehdi hinted. Mehdi also suggested that parental controls might become a premium service as of MSN 9.0.

MSN 9.0 "is designed to have people pay additional money to have a premium experience on the Internet: things like complete spam protection, complete security when you are sending e-mail, parental control to protect your kids on the Web, as well as maybe richer broadband things like video and music subscriptions as well as enhanced premium software to do better e-mail in collaboration," Mehdi told Goldman conference attendees.

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Source: MS-Watch