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Encyclopedia Down: Encarta Bites the Dust |
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Dr. Samuel Says -
Bidness
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Wednesday, 01 April 2009 |
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I suppose it was inevitable. Microsoft this week announced that it would be discontinuing its Encarta product line, effectively bringing to an end the decades-long multimedia encyclopedia wars. The winner? Wikipedia, of course, which is now the destination for approximately 97 percent of Internet encyclopedia queries.
 In one of my previous careers, as a New Media pundit, I was on the
encyclopedia beat at a major consumer technology magazine. For a while,
I was a major player in the multimedia market wars as Encarta, World
Book, Britannica and a few others battled it out. I was often flown out
to various HQs and conventions to get an early peek at the new CD sets
(later, DVD), and my review quotes were on the back of many retail
editions in the '96-'98 era.
Of course, I had a different name then. And I didn’t look like I look
now. The price you pay for engaging in corporate espionage. Still, I
knew that stuff inside and out. Encarta had the multimedia bells and
whistles, Britannica the depth, World Book the K-12 education market.
Wikipedia trumps them all, of course, by the simple calculus of
employing millions of contributors, for free. Nice for the Egalitarian
Information Age, Etc., but rather a setback for those of us with a
vested interest in professional editorial work. Ah, well. Such is
progress.
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