Dear Digital Mobs,Sorry for the long delay since my last post, I am still trying to recover form the never-ending holidays and my kids' school vacations.
But here I am and I must say Congratulations! You did it! You killed the institutional, editor-based Encyclopedia (and dictionary). An institution that started 281 years ago with the first encyclopedia publication (i.e. Chamber’s Cyclopedia) and will soon be just a chapter in your Wikipedia.
Yes, I suppose it is already old news but to make sure you know what I am talking about, my dear mobs, let me tell you that Microsoft announced few weeks ago (April 2009) that it is shutting down its Encarta business and will also discontinue its student and premium Encarta software products and services (http://encarta.msn.com/guide_page_FAQ/FAQ.html).
I suppose you all saw that coming, Encarta couldn’t match your free rich and most updated Wikipedia with only its 62,000 articles in the 2009 Encarta edition and having only 1.27% hit rate (U.S. online encyclopedia market, according to Hitwise) compared to your Wikipedia's 2,818,976 articles (English version as of March 31) and 97% hit rate. So what do you say? Should we join Christopher Dawson from ZDnet and shout along "The encyclopedia is dead. Long live critical thinking"? It's not that Encarta's information is bad; it is just a dead business i.e. Microsoft can't compete cost-effectively with Wikipedia's free and instantly available information.
For those who have some interest in history(*), the story of Encarta starts when young Bill Gates was looking for a high-price, high-demand addition to his Windows 1.0 offering. Following an internal market research performed in 1981, Microsoft came to the conclusion that "no other broad-appeal content product in any category in any medium has a well-established single-user price point anywhere close to this/i.e.Encyclopedia).” [this is taken from a real Microsoft internal strategy memo]. This was indeed the case in the 80s when Encyclopedias commanded a price point of $500–$2,000 versus $5–$75 for a dictionary and $5–$40 for an almanac.
Microsoft never considered developing its own Encyclopedia content but were looking for a partner. After being rejected by Britannica (the high quality market leader in those days), World Book and others quality based publishers they finally settled on a deal in 1989 with Funk & Wagnall’s, a brand that was known as a “periodic promotional item in the aisles of supermarkets.” With the Funk & Wagnall’s deal and Microsoft’s competencies in software development, Microsoft could not build its encyclopedia on the highest-quality content; instead, it invested in graphics, sound and video to bring value to its product.
First edition of Encarta was released in 1993. In 1995 Microsoft introduced a version of Encarta that allowed users to update the contents by downloading content through the Internet. In 1996 Encarta had a dominant position in the multimedia encyclopedia market. Eventually the whole product went online on the Internet. But the reality was that Encarta never became a large revenue generator for Microsoft, despite the significant volume of Internet traffic it generated.
It is definitely the end of an era, a real evidence that the digital mobs revolution is here. Encarta was an essential millstone in the digitization of knowledge and was an early example of the advantages of digital content over the printed word. Encarta was quickly searchable, and could pack more media. Encarta was based on an innovative technology that disrupted an established paper based industry. Now another innovative technology, the Internet and its hive-mind, has turned the tables on Encarta. It only took 15 years for the product to go from dream to dust.
Now, that Encarta is a digital memory, I believe you have a bigger responsibility my fellow mobs, your next generation's general education is in your hands (BTW, the word Encyclopedia itself comes from Greek, meaning “a general education"). Tough Wikipedia comes as a winner with its free text-oriented content it has some way to go to improve its media capabilities. Compared to Encarta, Wikipedia's biggest weakness is lack of quality media mainly because the media is not free (Andrew Lih, author of “The Wikipedia Revolution").
Now we will need to wait and see what will be the future of to the last Mohican, the Encyclopedia Britannica while it is trying to fight back. On last January Britannica announced that it will accept edits and submissions from the public in an effort for its online version to try to keep up. Let's all wish Britannica good luck … in the meantime
:-)
(*) Based on "The Crisis at Encyclopædia Britannica" , ©2006 by the Kellogg School of Management
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