Microsoft Encarta Dies After Long Battle With Wikipedia
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/m...with-wikipedia/
By Noam Cohen
Microsoft delivered the coup de grâce Monday to its dying Encarta encyclopedia, acknowledging what everyone else realized long ago: it just couldn’t compete with Wikipedia, a free, collaborative project that has become the leading encyclopedia on the Web.
In January, Wikipedia got 97 percent of the visits that Web surfers in the United States made to online encyclopedias, according to the Internet ratings service Hitwise. Encarta was second, with 1.27 percent. Unlike Wikipedia, where volunteer editors quickly update popular entries, Encarta can be embarrassingly outdated. The entry for Joseph R. Biden Jr., for example, identifies him as vice president-elect and a U.S. senator.
The Encarta software will be removed from stores by June, Microsoft said, and the affiliated worldwide Web sites will be closed by the end of October. (The Japanese site will continue until the end of December.)
Without mentioning Wikipedia directly, Microsoft explained its decision on a FAQ page for Encarta. “The category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed,” it said. “People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past. As part of Microsoft’s goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today’s consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business.”
On that same page, the company asked itself if other Microsoft educational software would be discontinued as well. Its answer: “We’re not making any other announcements at this time.” The bulk of the Microsoft FAQ page explains how subscribers to the Encarta service could get a refund on what they had paid.
In the mid- to late 1980s, when Encarta began as a pet project of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, it had the potential to be as unsettling to the traditional encyclopedia business as Wikipedia is today.
After being rebuffed by Encyclopedia Britannica as a partner in making material available to personal computer users as a CD-ROM, Microsoft in 1989 went to Funk & Wagnalls and decided to make “a virtue of necessity,” according to 2006 case history by Professor Shane Greenstein and Michelle Devereux for the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
“Microsoft could not build its encyclopedia on the highest-quality content,” they wrote. “Instead, it invested in choice graphics and sound to bring value to its product.”
In the pre-Internet and early Internet era, Encarta was an example of Microsoft trying to enhance the experience of PC users –- a way of selling the computer experience to an unfamiliar public.
“You could very much argue that Encarta, was a me-too product, a way to add some more value to the Microsoft suite” of software that came with Windows, said Andrew Lih, author of “The Wikipedia Revolution,” a new history of Wikipedia. “Microsoft never added the resources or brainpower to be anything more than that.” (I wrote about Mr. Lih’s book and the significance of Wikipedia in Sunday’s Times.)
As the amount of information available online grew exponentially, it became quaint to purchase DVDs of factual material. While a free, text-oriented project like Wikipedia could not compete with the graphics and design of Encarta, that wasn’t important to consumers.
Still, Mr. Lih said something would be lost in the shuttering of Encarta. “Bill Gates bought Corbis, and Encarta had access to all these images that Wikipedia could never get,” he said. “Right now, that is a big weakness of Wikipedia -– the material has to be free.”
Mathias Schindler, one of the administrators of German Wikipedia, said he had already sent an e-mail to Microsoft asking the company to release the material from Encarta that it doesn’t plan to use anymore.
--------------------------------------------------
Man, I remember the Encarta that we got with our Packard Bell in the mid 90s. It was all graphical and spiffy! Those were the days.
Also, it's fascinating to see an encyclopedia go down like this. I wonder if Britannica and the like are hurting, and how they'll end up.
Microsoft Encarta go bye bye
Moderator: Tsuki