4 ms·
I recall reading a story (couldn't find it just now) about how Bill Gates tried unsuccessfully to license the Britannica content to create his digital encyclope
by yarone 15y ago
I recall reading a story (couldn't find it just now) about how Bill Gates tried unsuccessfully to license the Britannica content to create his digital encyclopedia product. Instead, Microsoft cobbled together assets themselves and built Encarta (1993).
Microsoft proceeded to trounce the print Encyclopedia business by creating a better product that severely undercut the traditional players.
Here we are, 2012, finally Britannica is dead. That took longer than expected.
- kragen 15y agoI think Wikipedia is what trounced Britannica (and, earlier, Encarta, which is no longer being sold even online), and that Wikipedia is much more a descendant of Britannica than it is of Encarta.
- joering2 15y agoI recall Encarta as the first CD that came with my CD-ROM back then it was 2x read speed. I was extremely amazed how entire encyclopedia full of content with pictures, sounds and charts that I could most likely never read from start to end can fit into one single disc of a palm size. History goes on... can you actually imagine in next 250 years what will replace Wikipedia? Imagine this: "After 250 years, Wikipedia shuts down its remaining servers due to lack of traffic".
- beza1e1 15y agoWhat will replace Wikipedia? Something which generates that data automatically from the "citations". I imagine Wolfram Alpha, Freebase, DBpedia, Cyc, TrueKnowledge and more all channeled into a single interface.
- joering2 15y ago+1. did not know any of those.. learnt so much today trueknowledge is amazing, thanks!!
- jayzee 15y agoI used both products while growing up and I think that Encarta sucked. It was in no way a competitor to Encyclopedia Brittanica. I read in a book ("Blown to Bits") that one of the reasons why Brittanica flopped was because the sales people did not understand what they were selling. They thought that what they were selling was knowledge. But most of the customers bought the books to assuage parental guilt, that they were doing enough by their children. Once the computer came around people stopped buying encyclopedia's so that "Johnny would do well in school," and bought computers instead. Encyclopedia Brittanica did end up becoming a victim of changing technology, but in the short term at least, not in the direct way as is assumed.
- camiller 15y agoOne thing I remember about Encarta back when the Pentium 75mHz was king, If you copied a passage of text and pasted it into MS word, it automatically generated a footnote entry. To this day I've never seen any other software do that. (Not saying there isn't any, I've just not seen it)
- anamax 15y ago> Instead, Microsoft cobbled together assets themselves and built Encarta (1993). According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls , Microsoft licensed Funk and Wagnalls.