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Many Google search results lead off with a pointer to Wikipedia. Google has effectively enlisted millions of Web page authors, whose links serve as recommendations for the largest editorial board ever assembled. Authority now comes not from a small group of encyclopedia editors and famous contributors but from GoogleвЂ™s algorithms, which analyze links that point to Web pages elsewhere and other clues to make an educated guess about trustworthiness. The Google search engine is an automated, continuously updated, always-expanding guide to information that is completely free. вЂњThat bought Encarta some time,вЂќ he added.Д®ncarta could not compete, however, against the Web and Google. Tom Corddry, a senior manager at Microsoft from 1989 to 1996 who headed up its multimedia publishing unit, said, вЂњThe editors overestimated the way students would say, вЂThis has been carefully edited! And is very authoritative!вЂ™вЂќД®ncarta would have been discontinued long before now if it hadnвЂ™t extended its natural life span by finding a market in international spots beyond the reach of the Internet, Mr. That investment, however, seems to have gone unnoticed by EncartaвЂ™s users. Fifty people В— editors, fact-checkers and indexers В— were on the team in 2000, at the peak of MicrosoftвЂ™s editorial investment in Encarta, he said. Gary Alt, who joined Microsoft in 1995 after working as an editor at World Book and at Encyclopedia Britannica, spoke with pride of the editorial work that he and his Encarta team had done. I contacted some of the people who worked on Encarta during its early days to collect their reflections. Earlier this year, Microsoft sold Encarta as a downloadable product for $29.95 most recently, it was marked down to $22.95. Over time, the price of the product fell even more. Its sales passed a million units the next year. The $99 Encarta was a smashing success: it quickly sold 350,000 units, making it the best-selling CD-ROM encyclopedia by the end of 1993. Martin Leahy, a Microsoft sales manager, told any colleague who would listen, вЂњYou realize, donвЂ™t you, the price is never going up again, right?вЂќ It never did. MicrosoftвЂ™s sales managers were frantic, begging the team to give them a вЂњ$99 Encarta.вЂќ The Encarta team relented, but said it was to be only a temporary reduction for the 1993 holiday sales season. Retailers did not ask to see proof, and the boxes flew off the shelf. But the leader was ComptonвЂ™s, which sold its CD-ROM Interactive Encyclopedia, nominally priced at $395, for just $129 to any customer who claimed to own a competing product. When Encarta was finally ready, Microsoft set its price at $395, the same price as other CD-ROM encyclopedias that had beaten it to the market.Д®ncarta sold poorly, gaining only 3 percent of the market six months after its release, according to Microsoft. But at the time, no one foresaw the collapse of prices in the information economy. The team developed illustrations and maps, a timeline and an atlas, assembled and wrote captions for 11,000 photographs and digitized eight hours of sound clips.Д®arly in the projectвЂ™s history, a focus group of prospective customers was convened, and participants said they would happily pay $1,000 to $2,000 for a multimedia encyclopedia on CD-ROM. MicrosoftвЂ™s Encarta team concentrated on developing nontext supplements that would make it a multimedia extravaganza. It finally found a willing licensor in Funk & Wagnalls.

Encarta software license#

Microsoft tried unsuccessfully to license rights to Encyclopedia BritannicaвЂ™s text, then World BookвЂ™s. In 1985, Bill Gates envisioned a CD-ROM encyclopedia as a вЂњhigh-price, high-demandвЂќ product with the potential of becoming as profitable to Microsoft as Word or Excel. The Google-indexed Web forms a virtual encyclopedia that Encarta never had a chance of competing against.Д®ncarta was conceived pre-Web and had a long gestation. But Encarta arguably would have failed even without that competition.

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ItвЂ™s hard to look at the end of the Encarta experiment without the free and much larger Wikipedia springing immediately to mind.

Encarta software software#

1 best-selling encyclopedia software brand for the past eight years.вЂќ Microsoft recently announced that sales would soon cease and that the Encarta Web site, supported by advertising, would be shut down later this year. THIS is the end of the line for Encarta, the encyclopedia that Microsoft introduced in 1993 and still describes boastfully on its Web site as вЂњthe No.