Microsoft’s Encarta team concentrated on developing nontext supplements that would make it a multimedia extravaganza. It finally found a willing licensor in Funk & Wagnalls. Microsoft tried unsuccessfully to license rights to Encyclopedia Britannica’s text, then World Book’s. In 1985, Bill Gates envisioned a CD-ROM encyclopedia as a “high-price, high-demand” product with the potential of becoming as profitable to Microsoft as Word or Excel. The Google-indexed Web forms a virtual encyclopedia that Encarta never had a chance of competing against.Įncarta was conceived pre-Web and had a long gestation. But Encarta arguably would have failed even without that competition. It’s hard to look at the end of the Encarta experiment without the free and much larger Wikipedia springing immediately to mind. 1 best-selling encyclopedia software brand for the past eight years.” Microsoft recently announced that sales would soon cease and that the Encarta Web site, supported by advertising, would be shut down later this year. THIS is the end of the line for Encarta, the encyclopedia that Microsoft introduced in 1993 and still describes boastfully on its Web site as “the No.
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