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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