Redmond, Washington — One of the digital world’s best and oldest sources of knowledge, Microsoft’s online encyclopedia Encarta, which dates back to the pre-Internet era as a CD-ROM-only product, is now geared up to shutter the service. Microsoft on Tuesday itself announced that it would discontinue the online version of Encarta by October as well as pulling down sales of the PC software by June.
The company itself on its notice page announced the fate of the now online encyclopedia, stating that the site will be shut down on October 31 for most of the world. However, the Japanese version of the site will continue until December 31. Users who subscribed to premium features will have their accounts credited for fees paid beyond April 30.
Furthermore, the company said that it will also stop the distribution of the Encarta Student and Encarta Premium software by the end of June.
Appearing in the early 90’s, back then, when even a CD-ROM drive was a novelty, Encarta was one of the first encyclopedias to be offered in electronic form on CD-Rom discs. The collection was later moved online, but a lot has transformed in the intervening years, including Internet resources sites such as Wikipedia and other online news and history media that tap into the collective knowledge of the world.
Nevertheless, critics argued some of Microsoft’s editorial decisions, including the fact that Encarta’s dictionary had a photo of Bill Gates and not one of John F. Kennedy. But the electronic knowledge base was an early example of the advantages of digital content over the printed word, especially given the rate at which Microsoft products were gaining girth. Encarta was quickly search-able, and could pack more images, plus video and sound.
The company said that the decision to shut down the service was based on an inevitable shift in the way people access information, making a hosted encyclopedia format impractical for the company.
“People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past,” the company said.
“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.”
Criticizing a report in the NYT over Encarta’s death, a member of the original development team, Tom Corddry, responds:
“By the standards of the print encyclopedia world, Microsoft invested heavily in expanding and updating the content of Encarta right from the beginning. We consciously invested in the contextual value just described, in expanding the core content, in creating the world’s first truly global encyclopedia, and in an efficient update cycle. We had enough “multimedia” in the original product to keep the reviewers happy, but focused on the overall usefulness of the whole product much more than on the relative handful of video clips, etc. I’d argue that within its first five years, Encarta became the best encyclopedia in history…”
Prior to the rise of electronic encyclopedias, most people had to go to the library and refer to one or more of the massive volumes that left shelves sagging. A few lucky souls had their own private encyclopedia sets at home, perhaps because they surrendered to a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman in a moment of weakness. However, encyclopedias of the paper kind began their decline when products like Encarta emerged. And adding to that, Encarta attained a further superiority over bound volumes in the early days of the Web because it could pull down updated content while its printed competitors’ articles grew stale.
We have completed a huge circle here. Encarta was based on an innovative technology that interrupted an established industry. Now another innovative technology, the Internet and its hive-mind, has reversed the tides on Encarta. It only took 15 years for the product to go from dream to dud. It is not that Encarta’s information is bad, just that Microsoft can not compete cost-effectively with Wikipedia’s free and instantly available information.
As soon as Microsoft’s announcement, enthusiasts of Wikipedia, which basically killed Encarta, began demanding for its archives to be donated to the non-profit people’s encyclopedia.
Rather the company reiterated that those customers having subscriptions to its premium Encarta service will get a refund for fees paid beyond April 30, but will be able to access the content with their user names and passwords until the service goes off-line. Encarta Japan will shut down on Dec. 31.