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 Unlike Wikipedia, where volunteer editors quickly update popular entries, Encarta can be embarrassingly outdated.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.
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Microsoft Encarta? Never heard of it.
— Smoove T from DCThe fact that people who know nothing about a subject “nominate for speedy deletion” articles about that subject is the single thing which irks me most about Wikipedia. That people who know nothing write articles is only mildly bothersome.
— BrianSo by someone’s logic, MS is like Obama and Wikipedia is like the Bush Republicans? O where will the hater’s logic lead them to next? That Apple is a non-profit?
— Walter GThe basic premise of the blog is off-target. Encarta was never really in competition with Wikipedia. How do you compete with a free, nonprofit product that doesn’t even accept advertising? Rather, Encarta was in competition with search engines and the Web as a whole, since that is how many people do research these days. They enter their research term in a search engine and go from there. Why buy a reference work when the Web is a reference work? Wikipedia was smart in having many links to its content so it ranked high in Google’s page-ranking algorithm. Its top rankings in search results gave it increased visibility and popularity. Encarta’s business model didn’t allow for it to give away its content free, although it tried to entice online subscriptions for awhile by putting a small percentage of its content online for free and hoping that would encourage people either to subscribe or buy the CD/DVD product.
I’m not sure if it’s true that Microsoft approached Britannica for its content, but it’s possible. One of the authors of the “case history” that makes this claim is or was married to a Britannica employee, so it may well be the case. It’s well known that Bill Gates read the entire World Book Encyclopedia as a kid, and that Microsoft approached World Book for rights to an electronic edition of World Book, which turned them down–reportedly because the people in charge at the time thought CD/ROMS wouldn’t go anywhere. But to say, as the authors of that “case history” apparently do, that since Microsoft couldn’t get quality content, it chose “instead” to invest “in choice graphics and sound to bring value to its product” is somewhat laughable. From the git-go, Encarta was going to be a multimedia encyclopedia. Audio and video are what distinguished it as a product for computers, along with easily searchable text and cross-linking. Nevertheless, Microsoft certainly didn’t neglect text and in fact, made a substantial investment in improving the quality of the original Funk & Wagnalls. It succeeded to a great extent with many original articles and others that were vastly revised.
Oddly enough, Wikipedia reminds me somewhat of that original Funk & Wagnalls. The science and technology articles, like those in the original F&W, tend to be full of jargon and assume a lot of knowledge on the part of the reader. The articles are rarely aimed at younger readers or at explaining difficult concepts in science and technology. With the original F&W, this was because they had a small editorial staff that didn’t have the time to improve the articles submitted by scientists and engineers, who tended to write in jargon and passive voice, like the scientific journals in which they get published. Wikipedia’s science and technology articles tend to read the same way because the articles are written by hobbyists writing for other hobbyists.
There are, of course, some excellent articles in Wikipedia. What I will miss is the idea that people value scholarship, that when they consult a reference work, they’re looking for an article written by someone who devoted their entire life to a particular subject. That scholar is distilling their knowledge for a general audience seeking a basic introduction and perhaps a guide to more resouces if they wish to go deeper. The ability to probe more deeply after all is what the digital age should be all about. Print encyclopedias could never do this because every inch of space cost money. For electronic encyclopedias, the sky’s the limit. Encata did this somewhat with its Sidebar and Web Links features, linking people to primary source material and other background information, including the latest scholarship on the Web. All reliably vetted.
In any event the tone of this blog seems to be consistent with “gotcha journalism,” rather than a serious effort to understand how we can use the strengths of the digital age to advance education and understanding. This is remarkable when you consider that many people think the New York Times is facing a future much like Encarta’s.
— RodThis reminds me a bit of how IMDB vanquished Microsoft’s Cinemania.
— LarryAB:
I’ve used Wikipedia quite often. Never as an academic source, but rather for general “take it or leave it” knowledge. I’ve even edited certain articles for accuracy on certain topics that I’m close to.
I even found Wikipedia to have a misrepresentation in regards to the history of MS Encarta. Care to look?:
“The name Encarta was created for Microsoft by an advertising agency, which decided that it sounded better than Funk & Wagnalls”
That’s a bit simplistic. I was sitting in the building 10 cafeteria with the rest of the team when the product name was revealed to us (Previously it had been referred to only by its code name, “Gandalf”). The reasons had to do with ownability, trademarkability and the need to have a name that did not mean anything in any of the major world languages (like Chevy Nova en español). The name was never going to be Funk and Wagnalls. We simply purchased much of their content. We also created a lot of original content of our own. We took advantage of the new possibilities of the medium including video, sound and animation, etc.
Encarta was launched and it sold a lot of copies starting back in 1993. So many that it dwarfed the sales of printed encyclopedias. When the content went online, it literally killed them off (not that this was the concept). As Tom said in his statement, I don’t think anyone at Microsoft ever expected Encarta to rule the world of historical information. As I remember it, in 1992, multimedia was the next big thing. Microsoft wanted to be in publishing of multimedia titles, and they were simply exploring the market to see what it might become. The internet changed that market quite a bit but they successfully extended the life of Encarta by also taking it to the web.
It makes no sense to mock the fall of Encarta. If you do so, it makes about as much sense as mocking the 1st stage rocket booster for Apollo 11. At least it got us off the ground, eh? Wikipedia would have nothing to wiki if not for Encarta and the efforts of the team, and I think you know it.
— PatrickThanks to Noam for noting this bit of history, and to Tom Corddry for the view from Microsoft. I was part of the EB Advanced Technology Group, lead by Harold Kester (deceased) from the end of 1992 until about 2000, and appreciate the chance to revisit these old days.
Stories that jump to mind: the full page ads Encarta ran for awhile in Chicago papers, trying to recruit EB and World Book editors; the letters that EB editors got concerning errors in Encarta content! (some readers seemed to think EB was THE encyclopedia I guess.)
Others might be interested in the detailed account provided by Bob McHenry, “The Building of Britannica Online,” http://www.howtoknow.com/BOL1.html. Bob was Editer in Chief of Ency. Britannica, and flew back and forth between the EB mother ship in Chicago and the La Jolla ATG almost as often as Harold did. Bob’s history starts way back, with Grolier’s DOS-based version in 1985, Compton/Britannica’s CDROM/multimedia Encyclopedia in 1989, through the group’s demise in 2001.
— Rik Belew
— Rik BelewI worked on Encarta, and while it was a great experience, it was never “the greatest encyclopedia in history”–there were simply too many mistakes in it. I identified a lot of them myself–most were never fixed.
Encarta served its purpose, but, to be honest, I’m surprised it took Microsoft this long to shut the project down.
— BLThe quality of Wikipedia articles is inherently questionable, especially regarding “controversial” subjects (Global Warming, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, waterboarding, etc.). They are akin to getting input about a topic from a seemingly knowledgeable neighbor — a usually good starting point for research, but you really need to follow-up you’re seriously interested. But this is generally the case for encyclopedias, even the more scholarly and fact checked ones — once you get to college at least, you are expected to use primary sources for any serious research. The main advantage of Wikipedia is that its articles tend to have a good list of sources to follow up on, but even here you have to be careful — dubious politically based sources are often included in the controversial articles.
But for someone who just want to do a quick look-up of a topic, and wants something more stable and fact checked than Wikipedia, the loss of Encarta as a Wikipedia alternative is unfortunate.
— BCI still find it amusing that anyone is comparing Encarta and Wikipedia as “competitors” to one another. Considering how much changed in the computing world, I think taking a product and brand such as Encarta a full 16+ years beyond its initial publishing date is quite remarkable. How many early (1994-1996) dot.com’s have lasted 16 years? Oh wait, 16 years has not passed yet.
— PatrickWikipedia is successful because Google algorithm made/makes it so.
Once upon a time, not long ago, you could search for things that weren’t in Wikipedia, and you’d still get a page one Google result taking you to Wikipedia … and a suggestion that you create the article.
Any questions on why Wikipedia — for the moment — prevails?
— anonymousBrian brings up one of my Wikipedia pet peeves, One example: there seems to have been a big argument over a short article about the Nokia N85 phone, which resulted in the deletion of the article. The main claim was that it was too much like a product spec sheet for the phone. That’s fine; but nearly every other Nokia model (as well as most other cellphones, computers, PDA’s, etc.) have Wikipedia pages. While this is hardly a major problem; it shows the capriciousness of some Wikipedia participants.
— LarryMr Lih is incorrect. He assumes - as do many - that Microsoft had free use of Corbis images. These are two different companies. Unless it was it was a free PR shot or created in house, Encarta had to acquire the rights (& pay a fee) for all the media that was included in the product, which sometimes included layers of rights & fees for music, video and artworks. Something that Wikipedia was able to skirt around.
— MTom and Rod - nice to hear from you here. Patrick - I suspect I came on shortly after you left, so I don’t think we ever met. I have a lump in my throat this week. I’m proud of what we created in Encarta, which is a lot more than just adding some visual bells and whistles, as Rod and Tom have explained. As noted above, Encarta had a large and capable editorial staff for several years which re-wrote much of the text from scratch, which is not adequately explained in the original blog, and the text made huge strides in that short time (by history of encyclopedia standards).
One could debate which US encyclopedia was best in that era - it really depends on what criteria you use. In any case, Encarta became a real contender during my tenure on the project, and I’m proud of that. We also developed many new multimedia feature concepts that I see cropping up again in other forms across the web.
As for the comment regarding donating images and other media - most of this content is owned by third parties, and was licensed by Microsoft spefically for use within Encarta. So regardless of what Microsoft wished to do, it would not be able to just donate this portion of the content to the world for use in wikipedia or wherever.
I do sometimes wonder if we could have pulled off a wikipedia style effort if we’d gotten there first. A concern I had back then was whether people would have the same motivation to donate their time “to Microsoft,” versus to a not-for-profit entity such as the Wikimedia Foundation. We never adequately tried, so we’ll never know, but I do have my doubts.
-Jim
— Jim Ok“Right now, that is a big weakness of Wikipedia -– the material has to be free.”
I beg to differ. That the material has to be free is a guarantee that when my niece will use a photo from Wikipedia for show-and-tell, she will not be cited for copyright violation.
By the way, how does it benefit ME for Microsoft to own Corbis any more than for Wikipedia’s images to be free?
— K OneAlthough I generally dislike M$, I have to agree with Tom Corddry that Encarta was an excellent encyclopaedia. When you consider the massive cost of the dozens of volumes of Enyc. Britannica, in the early days it was almost worth buying a PC just to run Encarta on. The Web has changed all that, and although Wikipedia is my first port of call for reference material, it iis not perfect. Many articles tend to either become baroque monstrosities due to excessive additions or are conversely are pared down to nothing by wiki-fascists who insist everything be supported by a published reference. Also, unlike the Encarta on your hard drive, Wikipedia tracks your searches and even publishes raw search data of it users (if you know where to look), a privacy violation that search engines would be crucified for.
— joseI joined the Encarta team in 1992, shortly before the first CD version shipped in 1993.
I can attest to the fact that enormous effort, expertise, and expense went into thoroughly reviewing the licensed Funk and Wagnalls text content. PCs and even email were not as prevalent at the time, so we recruited academic experts to review the text and sent them boxes filled with printouts of the articles to mark up. We then incorporated the necessary changes and updates and also rewrote many, many articles based on their feedback. At the same time, we editors (and the rest of the Encarta team) worked tirelessly to develop new features and multimedia that would help students really enjoy using Encarta to do their schoolwork.
It is worth noting that school and family use of technology changed dramatically during Encarta’s heyday. PCs became more prevalent in classrooms, no longer residing only in a computer room or library resource center. The desktop computer, once kept only in a parent’s home office, migrated to the family room in many cases and became the domain of the entire family. Encarta’s success dovetailed with changes like this in computer usage. In addition, the product’s price–hundreds of dollars less than print encyclopedias had been, and much cheaper than the CD and online versions of Britannica and World Book at the time–helped make it affordable to many families who could not have purchased any encylopedia previously.
Of course, times have changed in this decade, and availability of reference information has changed also. Like others, I recognize that the Internet (including Wikipedia) has lots of extremely useful content. However, I would advise students and their parents that without a product like Encarta–which aimed to present a balanced view of controversial topics, with an appropriate amount of detail–much more parental and teacher guidance is required to teach kids how to separate fact from opinion, and important information from trivia and jargon. If using Wikipedia as a source, NEVER EVER use it as the only source if accuracy and balance are important to you.
It was a privilege to be part of building a terrific and talented editorial team, to work with the great technical minds at Microsoft, and to deliver great text and media content to people around the world. Thanks to all who, at one time or another over the years, made Encarta possible.
— AnnFThere are good uses of encyclopedias at the university level, but they’re limited.
For example, in a recent paper of mine on J.S. Mill’s “On Liberty,” I used the endowment effect as a mechanism for understanding why his views on argument might create stronger feelings of knowledge without creating more actual knowledge. I cited Wikipedia when I gave a brief exposition of the effect.
Critical academic work will often take ideas from many sources, and in many cases an encyclopedia provides enough information to understand a concept outside the immediate field of study. I would never use an encyclopedia entry as the centre of a paper, but to explain a connection to a disparate field it can be quite useful, in particular when addressing an audience not familiar with said disparate field.
— PeterCordell makes a breathtaking leap by blaming the current administration for the downfall of Encarta. Drawing on some delusional parallel between xenophobic Japan’s economic collapse and Microsoft’s failed product strategy, he argues that closed strategies are at the heart of all things unsucessful. Then the leap - our current administration is somehow closed and to blame for a plethora of maladictions including Microsoft product strategy. I would argue that the one object that requires a dose of openess might just be between his ears.
— Xenophobic CordellI am an academic currently copy-editing/checking a general/young audience history book for an ‘educational’ publisher based in Europe.
The writer whose work I’m checking was obviously a bit pressed for time and a little bit out of his or her depth - I’ve removed quite a few Wikipedia-based factual howlers (they were idiosyncratic enough to trace directly back to the specific articles).
I use Wikipedia regularly for informal reference, particularly for apolitical nerd topics that are often covered in mind-boggling detail, but for a lot of areas it is no substitute for a vetted resource. The inaccurate articles about my specialist subjects will continue to acquire inaccuracies, because of the diverse political interests of those editing and re-editing them. They’ve turned into a flag by which I know who in my classes is not going to the library or using the book list…
It seems to me that everyone’s comparing two very different products only juxtaposed by technology. The fact that some people don’t realize how different they are is merely a manifestation of a more general problem with the everyday application of critical thought…
— LKWikipedia has become a real-life exercise in anarchy. A few years ago, I thought it was a really novel concept. The topics I’d looked-up seemed to have some very credible information. Then I’d come back months later to show a friend and find these articles to be completely re-written and dumbed down. Not because new or improved information had become available, but because the next author decided they preferred their own version.
Wikipedia has been taken over by infomation fascists. They are hardly seekers of truth, but rather abuse the power that free access to information gives them. I’m sure that both political parties (as well as major corporations) are employing people to edit and safeguard wikipedia information to their own respective likings. Rather than “Information in Motion”, Wikipedia is often like a perpetual game of “Capture the Flag”.
The word “publishing” is key to why Encarta was significant. Microsoft and the Encarta team had to stand behind every word in their product, and put their own names behind it. In contrast, Wikipedian “editors” hide behind cute anonymous monikers and they operate with virtual impunity. The worst that happens to them if they employ revisionist history or fraud, is that their IP address gets flagged, or they have to shift to a new computer to perpetuate the fraud.
Here is an example: As a public political figure, one might \ think that the widespread speculation on the sexuality of former AZ governor Janet Napolitano (and current U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security) would at least be worthy of a mention in the “personal life” section of the article. Well, good luck on that one. Try to even make MENTION of such speculation by editing the article. Not an assumption, or innuendo, but just the mere mention of how the public widely specualtes that she might possibly BE a homosexual. It will be immediately edited. The Democratic party will see to that.
Not to worry, as I’m sure the Republicans have their own Wikipedia defenders too. I’m just saying that the new frontier of digital openess is no utopia.
— Jerrygood post, Noam Cohen and wonder also what is your POV or take on the idea that reading online on a screen is vastly different in terms of comprehension, retention and analysis, not to mention critical thinking compared to reading on a paper surface? I coined a new word for this phenom i call it “screening” to differentiate it from “reading on paper” and i have alerted John Markoff and David Pogue at the Times about this, and James Fallows and Jason Pontin at MIT, and now you, Michael. Google “screening versus reading” and see the ongoing discussuons so far. I believe this has a lot to do with the future of newsPAPERS and online news sites too. Give it some thought, MK. and email me back, you know where to find me…..Danny Bloom, Tufts 1971
— Danny BloomI think the distinction lies in the state of mind involved. Reading from a book propitiates an active and thoughtful relation with the text, while on the Internet one more often engages in skimming and extracting information, rather than reflecting and assimilating.
— Danny BloomWikipedia, with a 97% share of the online encyclopedia market, has forced Microsoft to shut down Encarta. How long will it be before Wikipedia claims the prize scalp of Encyclopaedia Britannica?
Encyclopaedia Britannica did not think that an open source product like Wikipedia would significantly challenge the credibility of its brand. They were dead wrong and Encyclopaedia Britannica’s staff seriously misread the global market. They are now very concerned about the widespread use of a free Wikipedia vs their paid subscription model. From a corporate and financial perspective, Encyclopaedia Britannica is in significant trouble.
It will be interesting to see if Encyclopaedia Britannica survives, but recent indications do not look good. It is the combination of a) the success of Wikipedia and b) improved search engines that has put financial pressure on Encyclopedia Britannica over recent years. Many libraries, schools & individuals are questioning the need to pay for sets of expensive books, or to subscribe to Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, when the content is free on the internet, and much more comprehensive.
— S StephensI was surprised when I came to know that encarta the great encyclopedia will soon become a history.I am requesting MICROSOFT to launch another encyclopedia which could not only be useful for study but also for fun & entertainment.
— Saurav