13 ms·

Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out. Wikipedia in some ways beat it, but the interactivity

Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out. Wikipedia in some ways beat it, but the interactivity elements of Encarta make it something that you kind of wish had a more direct role in the modern day. I wrote about this topic a few years ago (https://tedium.co/2017/07/13/who-killed-the-encyclopedia/ https://tedium.co/2017/07/13/who-killed-the-encyclopedia/), and it led a former CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica to speak up (I added some of his comments to the piece). There was a lot of back-room wheeling and dealing around digital encyclopedias during that era, much of it centered around Encarta—Microsoft acquired a lot of publishers during that period and it effectively disrupted most of the rest out of existence. But even considering that, Encarta was special. I think Microsoft had the right idea—it was the killer app for CD-ROMs—though it turned out that the internet would only make it a temporary success story. It didn’t have to be like that, honestly. Imagine what might have happened if, for example, Microsoft worked more closely with the Wikimedia Foundation on the highly visual treatments the company was known for with Encarta. The nonprofit ownership was a good move, but the fact that MS seemed to cede the market entirely, especially so soon after disrupting the whole thing, was unfortunate.

nickthegreek 7y ago
I remember getting Encarta 95 back when it first came out (I was 14 at the time) and the interactive elements and audio clips blew my mind. It changed how I thought about information and got me that much more invested in learning technology. Literally a week after getting Encarta a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house and I showed him why I did not need his books. You could see the look of terror in his eyes.
- bredren 7y ago
  I saw the Hindenburg disaster video on Encarta, which was an intro to how articles and media could be put together. It amazed me at the time.
- jbob2000 7y ago
  With a little bit of investment, the Civilization game series could be leveraged to replace that feeling you got from Encarta.
- dawnerd 7y ago
  I actually just found an encarta 95 disk in a spindle of other random disks I had. Good memories from it.
- echelon 7y ago
  > a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house That's an alien relic of an anecdote as there ever was. The world has profoundly changed in the last twenty five years. Cheap, ubiquitous, networked computing has almost completely rewired society and changed business, jobs, dating, friendship, travel. I really wonder what the next big changes will be. Cheap satellites in orbit and dramatically reduced LEO costs? Better battery tech? Advances in materials science? Human cloning and genetic modification? What modern trappings of the present time will feel used and dated in twenty years?
  - AJ007 7y ago
    In Encarta’s case, cheap, high density storage mediums were passed by something that already existed and had existed for quite some time before, the internet. In other regards maybe the storage medium was just a side detail and the important part was what could be done with that data thanks to faster computers. There might be some parallels here today with machine learning. Neal Stephenson's quote about the future already being here but not being evenly distributed seems appropriate.
    - dgritsko 7y ago
      I think the "not evenly distributed" quote is from William Gibson.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      As Encarta was being developed (~1991 per another comment here), the Internet was still highly nascent. I was at uni during this period, and a major bragging right of the campus I was on was dedicated high-speed network connections to other schools within the university system ... over 56K leased lines. Those were shared amongst the 100k+ student, faculty, and staff population (though a very small fraction of those used it). The takeaways I get of this: 1. Exponentially-developing technology can pass you by quickly. The Internet went from exceedingly obscure to global in the ten years of the 1990s. Broadband wasn't ubiquitous by 1999, but it was increasingly available. 2. Standards matter. Even constructing a workstation that could handle reading Encarta was a challenge, and the tools to compose, render, and especially, present multimedia content (images, audio, video) were not common. Microsoft went the closed-source proprietary route, dooming them to the dustbin (though pieces were salvaged). 3. Standards are hard. Re-read above. 4. There are thresholds of utility that make or break things. I've been around infotech long enough (somewhat pre-dating the periods discussed here) that I've seen numerous technologies go from extreme cutting edge to widely adopted to passe. (And quite a few proposed but never gaining critical mass.) The reasons why any given tech fails right now are numerous. Luck plays a major role. The present has exceptionally cheap bulk storage (my tablet has a 128GB removable microSD card for about $50), high-speed, ubiquitous, and wireless networking, and tools for sharding and distributing updated documents and file formats (git, rysnc, etc.). This makes distributed updatable large-scale works possible. The technology of written works has undergone several seismic shifts, from clay tablet to papayrus roll to codex to moveable type. Less well-known (but only slightly) are the updatable formats: loose-leaf, three-ring, and replaceable bindings, all introduced in the late 19th century, which enabled updatable works. These were true "periodicals", where sections could be updated with amendments or replacements as information changed. The database, digital file, early version control, Wiki, and distributed version control are, IMO, all legitimately novel forms of written works, which should be recognised as such. They have and will continue to change how content is created and used, and affects and interacts with society.
- pkaye 7y ago
  My parents got us a full blown Encyclopedia Britannica book set in the 80s. Probably cost $1000 which was difficult by how much they made. But they paid it down monthly. I used to have loads of fun thumbing through those books. There were a few index books where you looked up a topic and it would refer you to a page in one of the other books. Closest thing to the internet back then.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    I had a World Book and then an Encyclopedia Britannica growing up. They gave me many many hours of pleasure. (I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that.) And, yes, I seem to recall the price was something in the $500-$1000 ballpark. Which was definitely a lot of money in the early 70s(?) when I got it--and, yes, the salesman came to the house.
    - pkaye 7y ago
      > I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that. Same here! The knowledge was obsolete but the memories of my childhood were a part of it. I eventually recycled most of them after I last moved but there are a few books I still have somewhere.
    - UncleSlacky 7y ago
      I inherited a 1952 World Book set from an older cousin, then part-exchanged it for a 1979 set (plus the 1980 "Year Book" update) thanks to the encyclopedia salesman. The normal price would have been around $1000 even then. Today they weigh down/stabilize one of my freestanding bookshelves in the living room.
    - 5555624 7y ago
      >I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that. A few years ago, during a move,I finally parted with the set my parents had gotten in the late 60s or early 70s. It was painful, but I had to really downsize at the time. I still have my 1911 edition, which I can't get rid of, even if I haven't cracked a volume in a couple of years.
- markus_zhang 7y ago
  Yeah it is THE software for multi-media showcase. Back in 90s I had a copy of shareware/demo version and it already blowed my mind off. The whole collection was like a dozen CD I think? I never got the chance to see it though. Nowadays we still don't have something that match up the experience.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  the interactive elements and audio clips blew my mind. It changed how I thought about information Same experience here. It was like having the computer from the Starship Enterprise but it was right here and now and I got to use it. It’s been a long time since I felt that sense of wonder from anything in computing.
- helloguillecl 7y ago
  Do you happen to remember this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A :)
- jacobolus 7y ago
  My grandparents got a Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia one volume at a time from a supermarket marketing thing in the 1950s. Amusingly, many of the articles in Encarta were copied verbatim from there.
  - voltagex_ 7y ago
    Last part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls >"After failing to purchase rights to the text of the Encyclopædia Britannica and World Book Encyclopedia for its Encarta digital encyclopedia, Microsoft reluctantly used (under license) the text of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia for the first editions of its encyclopedia. This licensed text was gradually replaced over the following years with content Microsoft created itself.[7]"
- JimOk 7y ago
  A long time encyclopedia editor (who worked at Britannica, World Book, and Encarta) told me that door to door encyclopedia sales were dying well before Encarta. Due to the rise in two income couples, which radically narrowed the time window when you could get anyone to give you time at the door...
ksec 7y ago
I see it as a Free Vs Paid Model, Wiki is Free, and it is good enough for most use cases. Encarta had a lot of licensing, and I doubt any of that will ever be free, but the quality of those articles inside Encarta or Britannica in many ways are still way ahead of Wiki.
- ticmasta 7y ago
  I think it goes even beyond paid vs free; the wiki model of knowledgeable, caring volunteers doing all this work for free seemed pretty crazy to all but a very few. Curated collections like Encarta and encyclopedias also tended to have very cursory entries for all but the broadest and market-focused topics. IMO a biased article is better than no information at all. In the very least it gives us a starting point for discovery, discussion and improvement. Most of what we today take for granted started with a pretty one-sided viewpoint that gained attention and inclusiveness.
- B1FF_PSUVM 7y ago
  Way back when, I yielded to temptation, as comrade Oscar advised, and at a fair bought a sealed Britannica CD-ROM box. It came with a parallel port dongle -not mentioned in the box copy- to ensure that the precious was not shared. It did not work right, and I was cured of buying that stuff.
duxup 7y ago
It's funny to think of it but CD-ROMs ... really were where all the multimedia was. Outside professionals, not many people stored videos or audio on their PC in the early day, so all the multimedia type stuff, and to some extent including video games ... was all centered around the CD-ROM. I used to gobble up all the super cheap "multimedia collection" type disks available at the time. To some extent what made computers the multimedia place to be was the good old CD-ROM, well before the internet took it over.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  There were earlier systems in the 1980s that combined PCs (or equivalent machines) with Pioneer LaserDisc systems (which could be controlled via a serial port) - a somewhat well known one was the BBC Domesday Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project An early glimpse of the future, somewhat.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Man what a mess of a project that was.
    - billpg 7y ago
      If only they had waited ten or so years.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
We have an old encyclopedia set - not Britannica though, from the 1910s or 1920s. I think it was my grandfather's originally, bought for father and uncles. Perhaps the generation earlier. Whilst it's not especially useful in today's world, it's a fascinating relic, especially on trades and skills that have declined or died out. On medicine, zoology and other sciences, it's occasionally surprising how we used to think. I'd periodically pick it up and read a few entries at random, and often disappear down a rabbit hole. At some point it stopped being obsolete and pointless to become fascinating history. That's one thing Encarta could have been had it continued - a valuable snapshot of how thought and knowledge evolved. Always updated Wikipedia can and will never be that as sadly you can't snapshot a given date, and digging through edit histories is horribly unfriendly. We may have lost something there.
- martin_a 7y ago
  > Whilst it's not especially useful in today's world, it's a fascinating relic, especially on trades and skills that have declined or died out. Same for me. My grandfather was a teacher and I saved quite a few of the old school/teaching books after he died. Did you know that the Empire State Building is the highest building on earth? Well, it was, when these books were printed. :-)
tzs 7y ago
> I think Microsoft had the right idea—it was the killer app for CD-ROMs—though it turned out that the internet would only make it a temporary success story. It was a killer app for CD-ROM, but for the title of the killer app I'd say DeLorme's "Street Atlas USA" had at least an equal claim.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  I would almost say the -the- killer app for CD-ROM was Myst. I know I bought my second PC in 1994 (an Acer 486 DX2-50 with Vesa Local Bus graphics and a CD-ROM drive) just so I could play it (my previous machines as an adult were both Amigas). You may be wondering why I say "second PC" - well, just before graduating high school my parents bought me a laptop, a Tandy 1100HD - which was technically my first PC. Later, after I had left home on my own, I bought an Amiga 2000, then an Amiga 1200, before getting the 486.
- tripzilch 7y ago
  ... not quite equal, Encarta was useful in more places than just the US.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
m1sta_ 7y ago
Is Encarta open source? Microsoft might be open to allowing it to be integrated into Wikipedia.
davidgerard 7y ago
> It didn’t have to be like that, honestly. Imagine what might have happened if, for example, Microsoft worked more closely with the Wikimedia Foundation on the highly visual treatments the company was known for with Encarta. The nonprofit ownership was a good move, but the fact that MS seemed to cede the market entirely, especially so soon after disrupting the whole thing, was unfortunate. We actually asked them about this, IIRC - it turns out a lot of that stuff was licensed from third parties, and they weren't free to release it under a free content license, and didn't have the resources to sort out what was what.
- shortformblog 7y ago
  That’s very unfortunate, but I’m glad to hear Wikipedia was actually thinking in this general direction.
scarface74 7y ago
Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out. Encarta lasted from 1991-2009. The iPod was introduced in 2001, saw sells start to fall off a cliff around 2009 and were all discontinued in 2017 - except for the iPod in name only iPod Touch. No one would say that the iPod was a failure. Encarta helped start the multimedia PC boom that helped make home computers more ubiquitous just like the iPod was Apple’s introduction to a wider audience.
- Retric 7y ago
  Calling the iPad touch an iPad in name only is disingenuous. It’s 1/2 the price of the original and has more space etc. As to falling off a cliff, they sold significantly more iPods in 09, 10, and 11 than 06. They even sold more than 3x as many iPods in 2014 than 2004. Apples watch is still a watch even if it does a lot of other things. Microsoft never ported Encarta functionality to anything after 09, it just died.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    2008 was peak iPod and they started declining after that. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quart... Note FYQ1 is calendar quarter 4.
    - Retric 7y ago
      As a brand sure, but the iPhone has been a fair replacement for many people. I mean digital camera sales have dropped 84% since 2010, but if anything people are taking far more photos now. For most people cellphones have mostly replaced watches, digital cameras, keychain flashlights, and MP3 players not because they are awesome at it but because having slightly better but largely redundant devices is not worth it. https://www.statista.com/chart/5782/digital-camera-shipments/ https://www.statista.com/chart/5782/digital-camera-shipments...
      - scarface74 7y ago
anthony_doan 7y ago
> Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out. Felt the same way with IE until Mozilla came along after Netscape died.
joblessjunkie 7y ago
I appreciated this article. I agree that "Microsoft was never in it for the history." Not to sound cynical, but I believe MSFT wasn't trying to sell encyclopedias, they were trying to sell CD-ROM drives. The upcoming Windows 93 (whoops, we slipped a little, make that 95) was going to require a billion floppy disks for distribution. Retail products were shipping in large boxes with comically tall stacks of expensive floppy disks. CD-ROMs, on the other hand, are so cheap to distribute that AOL mailed them out as unsolicited junk mail. It was worth sinking some money into a bunch of high-quality CD-ROM titles to get those drives standard on all PCs. Once that task was accomplished....

nickthegreek 7y ago

I remember getting Encarta 95 back when it first came out (I was 14 at the time) and the interactive elements and audio clips blew my mind. It changed how I thought about information and got me that much more invested in learning technology. Literally a week after getting Encarta a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house and I showed him why I did not need his books. You could see the look of terror in his eyes.

bredren 7y ago
I saw the Hindenburg disaster video on Encarta, which was an intro to how articles and media could be put together. It amazed me at the time.
jbob2000 7y ago
With a little bit of investment, the Civilization game series could be leveraged to replace that feeling you got from Encarta.
dawnerd 7y ago
I actually just found an encarta 95 disk in a spindle of other random disks I had. Good memories from it.
echelon 7y ago
> a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house That's an alien relic of an anecdote as there ever was. The world has profoundly changed in the last twenty five years. Cheap, ubiquitous, networked computing has almost completely rewired society and changed business, jobs, dating, friendship, travel. I really wonder what the next big changes will be. Cheap satellites in orbit and dramatically reduced LEO costs? Better battery tech? Advances in materials science? Human cloning and genetic modification? What modern trappings of the present time will feel used and dated in twenty years?
- AJ007 7y ago
  In Encarta’s case, cheap, high density storage mediums were passed by something that already existed and had existed for quite some time before, the internet. In other regards maybe the storage medium was just a side detail and the important part was what could be done with that data thanks to faster computers. There might be some parallels here today with machine learning. Neal Stephenson's quote about the future already being here but not being evenly distributed seems appropriate.
  - dgritsko 7y ago
    I think the "not evenly distributed" quote is from William Gibson.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    As Encarta was being developed (~1991 per another comment here), the Internet was still highly nascent. I was at uni during this period, and a major bragging right of the campus I was on was dedicated high-speed network connections to other schools within the university system ... over 56K leased lines. Those were shared amongst the 100k+ student, faculty, and staff population (though a very small fraction of those used it). The takeaways I get of this: 1. Exponentially-developing technology can pass you by quickly. The Internet went from exceedingly obscure to global in the ten years of the 1990s. Broadband wasn't ubiquitous by 1999, but it was increasingly available. 2. Standards matter. Even constructing a workstation that could handle reading Encarta was a challenge, and the tools to compose, render, and especially, present multimedia content (images, audio, video) were not common. Microsoft went the closed-source proprietary route, dooming them to the dustbin (though pieces were salvaged). 3. Standards are hard. Re-read above. 4. There are thresholds of utility that make or break things. I've been around infotech long enough (somewhat pre-dating the periods discussed here) that I've seen numerous technologies go from extreme cutting edge to widely adopted to passe. (And quite a few proposed but never gaining critical mass.) The reasons why any given tech fails right now are numerous. Luck plays a major role. The present has exceptionally cheap bulk storage (my tablet has a 128GB removable microSD card for about $50), high-speed, ubiquitous, and wireless networking, and tools for sharding and distributing updated documents and file formats (git, rysnc, etc.). This makes distributed updatable large-scale works possible. The technology of written works has undergone several seismic shifts, from clay tablet to papayrus roll to codex to moveable type. Less well-known (but only slightly) are the updatable formats: loose-leaf, three-ring, and replaceable bindings, all introduced in the late 19th century, which enabled updatable works. These were true "periodicals", where sections could be updated with amendments or replacements as information changed. The database, digital file, early version control, Wiki, and distributed version control are, IMO, all legitimately novel forms of written works, which should be recognised as such. They have and will continue to change how content is created and used, and affects and interacts with society.
pkaye 7y ago
My parents got us a full blown Encyclopedia Britannica book set in the 80s. Probably cost $1000 which was difficult by how much they made. But they paid it down monthly. I used to have loads of fun thumbing through those books. There were a few index books where you looked up a topic and it would refer you to a page in one of the other books. Closest thing to the internet back then.
- ghaff 7y ago
  I had a World Book and then an Encyclopedia Britannica growing up. They gave me many many hours of pleasure. (I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that.) And, yes, I seem to recall the price was something in the $500-$1000 ballpark. Which was definitely a lot of money in the early 70s(?) when I got it--and, yes, the salesman came to the house.
  - pkaye 7y ago
    > I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that. Same here! The knowledge was obsolete but the memories of my childhood were a part of it. I eventually recycled most of them after I last moved but there are a few books I still have somewhere.
  - UncleSlacky 7y ago
    I inherited a 1952 World Book set from an older cousin, then part-exchanged it for a 1979 set (plus the 1980 "Year Book" update) thanks to the encyclopedia salesman. The normal price would have been around $1000 even then. Today they weigh down/stabilize one of my freestanding bookshelves in the living room.
  - 5555624 7y ago
    >I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that. A few years ago, during a move,I finally parted with the set my parents had gotten in the late 60s or early 70s. It was painful, but I had to really downsize at the time. I still have my 1911 edition, which I can't get rid of, even if I haven't cracked a volume in a couple of years.
markus_zhang 7y ago
Yeah it is THE software for multi-media showcase. Back in 90s I had a copy of shareware/demo version and it already blowed my mind off. The whole collection was like a dozen CD I think? I never got the chance to see it though. Nowadays we still don't have something that match up the experience.
goatinaboat 7y ago
the interactive elements and audio clips blew my mind. It changed how I thought about information Same experience here. It was like having the computer from the Starship Enterprise but it was right here and now and I got to use it. It’s been a long time since I felt that sense of wonder from anything in computing.
helloguillecl 7y ago
Do you happen to remember this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A :)
jacobolus 7y ago
My grandparents got a Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia one volume at a time from a supermarket marketing thing in the 1950s. Amusingly, many of the articles in Encarta were copied verbatim from there.
- voltagex_ 7y ago
  Last part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls >"After failing to purchase rights to the text of the Encyclopædia Britannica and World Book Encyclopedia for its Encarta digital encyclopedia, Microsoft reluctantly used (under license) the text of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia for the first editions of its encyclopedia. This licensed text was gradually replaced over the following years with content Microsoft created itself.[7]"
JimOk 7y ago
A long time encyclopedia editor (who worked at Britannica, World Book, and Encarta) told me that door to door encyclopedia sales were dying well before Encarta. Due to the rise in two income couples, which radically narrowed the time window when you could get anyone to give you time at the door...

ksec 7y ago

I see it as a Free Vs Paid Model, Wiki is Free, and it is good enough for most use cases. Encarta had a lot of licensing, and I doubt any of that will ever be free, but the quality of those articles inside Encarta or Britannica in many ways are still way ahead of Wiki.

ticmasta 7y ago
I think it goes even beyond paid vs free; the wiki model of knowledgeable, caring volunteers doing all this work for free seemed pretty crazy to all but a very few. Curated collections like Encarta and encyclopedias also tended to have very cursory entries for all but the broadest and market-focused topics. IMO a biased article is better than no information at all. In the very least it gives us a starting point for discovery, discussion and improvement. Most of what we today take for granted started with a pretty one-sided viewpoint that gained attention and inclusiveness.
B1FF_PSUVM 7y ago
Way back when, I yielded to temptation, as comrade Oscar advised, and at a fair bought a sealed Britannica CD-ROM box. It came with a parallel port dongle -not mentioned in the box copy- to ensure that the precious was not shared. It did not work right, and I was cured of buying that stuff.

duxup 7y ago

It's funny to think of it but CD-ROMs ... really were where all the multimedia was. Outside professionals, not many people stored videos or audio on their PC in the early day, so all the multimedia type stuff, and to some extent including video games ... was all centered around the CD-ROM. I used to gobble up all the super cheap "multimedia collection" type disks available at the time. To some extent what made computers the multimedia place to be was the good old CD-ROM, well before the internet took it over.

cr0sh 7y ago
There were earlier systems in the 1980s that combined PCs (or equivalent machines) with Pioneer LaserDisc systems (which could be controlled via a serial port) - a somewhat well known one was the BBC Domesday Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project An early glimpse of the future, somewhat.
- duxup 7y ago
  Man what a mess of a project that was.
  - billpg 7y ago
    If only they had waited ten or so years.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

We have an old encyclopedia set - not Britannica though, from the 1910s or 1920s. I think it was my grandfather's originally, bought for father and uncles. Perhaps the generation earlier. Whilst it's not especially useful in today's world, it's a fascinating relic, especially on trades and skills that have declined or died out. On medicine, zoology and other sciences, it's occasionally surprising how we used to think. I'd periodically pick it up and read a few entries at random, and often disappear down a rabbit hole. At some point it stopped being obsolete and pointless to become fascinating history. That's one thing Encarta could have been had it continued - a valuable snapshot of how thought and knowledge evolved. Always updated Wikipedia can and will never be that as sadly you can't snapshot a given date, and digging through edit histories is horribly unfriendly. We may have lost something there.

martin_a 7y ago
> Whilst it's not especially useful in today's world, it's a fascinating relic, especially on trades and skills that have declined or died out. Same for me. My grandfather was a teacher and I saved quite a few of the old school/teaching books after he died. Did you know that the Empire State Building is the highest building on earth? Well, it was, when these books were printed. :-)

tzs 7y ago

> I think Microsoft had the right idea—it was the killer app for CD-ROMs—though it turned out that the internet would only make it a temporary success story. It was a killer app for CD-ROM, but for the title of the killer app I'd say DeLorme's "Street Atlas USA" had at least an equal claim.

cr0sh 7y ago
I would almost say the -the- killer app for CD-ROM was Myst. I know I bought my second PC in 1994 (an Acer 486 DX2-50 with Vesa Local Bus graphics and a CD-ROM drive) just so I could play it (my previous machines as an adult were both Amigas). You may be wondering why I say "second PC" - well, just before graduating high school my parents bought me a laptop, a Tandy 1100HD - which was technically my first PC. Later, after I had left home on my own, I bought an Amiga 2000, then an Amiga 1200, before getting the 486.
tripzilch 7y ago
... not quite equal, Encarta was useful in more places than just the US.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

m1sta_ 7y ago

Is Encarta open source? Microsoft might be open to allowing it to be integrated into Wikipedia.

davidgerard 7y ago

> It didn’t have to be like that, honestly. Imagine what might have happened if, for example, Microsoft worked more closely with the Wikimedia Foundation on the highly visual treatments the company was known for with Encarta. The nonprofit ownership was a good move, but the fact that MS seemed to cede the market entirely, especially so soon after disrupting the whole thing, was unfortunate. We actually asked them about this, IIRC - it turns out a lot of that stuff was licensed from third parties, and they weren't free to release it under a free content license, and didn't have the resources to sort out what was what.

shortformblog 7y ago
That’s very unfortunate, but I’m glad to hear Wikipedia was actually thinking in this general direction.

scarface74 7y ago

Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out. Encarta lasted from 1991-2009. The iPod was introduced in 2001, saw sells start to fall off a cliff around 2009 and were all discontinued in 2017 - except for the iPod in name only iPod Touch. No one would say that the iPod was a failure. Encarta helped start the multimedia PC boom that helped make home computers more ubiquitous just like the iPod was Apple’s introduction to a wider audience.

Retric 7y ago
Calling the iPad touch an iPad in name only is disingenuous. It’s 1/2 the price of the original and has more space etc. As to falling off a cliff, they sold significantly more iPods in 09, 10, and 11 than 06. They even sold more than 3x as many iPods in 2014 than 2004. Apples watch is still a watch even if it does a lot of other things. Microsoft never ported Encarta functionality to anything after 09, it just died.
- scarface74 7y ago
  2008 was peak iPod and they started declining after that. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quart... Note FYQ1 is calendar quarter 4.
  - Retric 7y ago
    As a brand sure, but the iPhone has been a fair replacement for many people. I mean digital camera sales have dropped 84% since 2010, but if anything people are taking far more photos now. For most people cellphones have mostly replaced watches, digital cameras, keychain flashlights, and MP3 players not because they are awesome at it but because having slightly better but largely redundant devices is not worth it. https://www.statista.com/chart/5782/digital-camera-shipments/ https://www.statista.com/chart/5782/digital-camera-shipments...
    - scarface74 7y ago

anthony_doan 7y ago

> Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out. Felt the same way with IE until Mozilla came along after Netscape died.

joblessjunkie 7y ago

I appreciated this article. I agree that "Microsoft was never in it for the history." Not to sound cynical, but I believe MSFT wasn't trying to sell encyclopedias, they were trying to sell CD-ROM drives. The upcoming Windows 93 (whoops, we slipped a little, make that 95) was going to require a billion floppy disks for distribution. Retail products were shipping in large boxes with comically tall stacks of expensive floppy disks. CD-ROMs, on the other hand, are so cheap to distribute that AOL mailed them out as unsolicited junk mail. It was worth sinking some money into a bunch of high-quality CD-ROM titles to get those drives standard on all PCs. Once that task was accomplished....