One of the longest running commercial interweb relationships has ended. Microsoft and NBC have finalised their online divorce and will both go at it alone.

The 16-year marriage between Microsoft Corp and NBC News came to an end last night when it was announced NBC was buying Microsoft’s 50 per cent interest in the MSNBC website for an undisclosed amount.

MSNBC.com has already been rebranded as NBCNews.com, and readers who visited MSNBC.com late yesterday evening found themselves automatically redirected to NBCNews.com.

The relationship began to get rocky in 2005 when Microsoft sold its stake in MSNBC’s cable TV channel to NBC.

Both have wanted to grow their own digital destinies as the Internet becomes a greater source of revenue for them both.

The move sees NBC relocating the new site’s headquarters to NBC News’ long-time home in New York.

Microsoft, in particular, had grown increasingly frustrated by contract terms requiring it to exclusively feature MSNBC.com content on its own websites.

Both felt restricted, and there had been a perception that material from MSNBC’s website was politically slanted, too.

Bob Visse, general manager of MSN.com:

Being limited to MSNBC.com content was problematic to us because we couldn’t have the multiple news sources and the multiple perspectives that our users were telling us that they wanted.

Microsoft will launch its own news service later this year, although no details have been made available yet about the new venture. Visse did however say that the news staff would be about the same size as the roughly 100 people who created original content for the MSNBC.com.

By hiring its own news staff to feed material to its websites, Microsoft is embracing the same strategy as the owners of two other major Internet companies, Yahoo and AOL.

Microsoft’s online operations, which include the Bing search engine and MSN portal, have lost more than $10 billion in the past seven years, and Microsoft initially invested $220 million in the MSNBC joint venture, so it’s unclear if Microsoft actually ended up making any money on the alliance.

[Source: NYTimes]