“When I first saw this, I had to do a double take,” writes Ars Technica’s Emil Protalinski of Microsoft’s announcement that that the company is killing Encarta this year. “I made sure it wasn’t April 1 at least three times before I conceded.”
–
I did a double take too, but in the opposite direction. Encarta? Really? The paid, static encyclopedia that lives on a disc remained viable until 2009? I’ll concede that there surely remained a large demo of educational and older folks that have a *thing* for those little discs, enough so to drive MS to keep selling it. But what’s striking is that they did so at the apparent expense of developing a wiki-modeled Encarta into which to funnel those legacy users.
–
Encarta Online is absolute rubbish; that it is statically populated is the obvious failing, but they even missed the plain-as-day appeal of Wikipedia link jumping. Look up April in Wikipedia and in Encarta. Which do you want to spend more time in, crowd-sourced hippiedom aside?
–
Vs.
–
Microsoft could easily have run with a strategy of building a Wikipedia of their own, leveraging the authority of the brand and built-in user base to build a viable Wikipedia competitor to run ads against for those many folks with the MSN start page. Instead they stood still and kept selling CDs. Google’s Knol may not be taking off, but Google is competing in a totally different early adopter demo.
–
In the past three years MS missed a chance to bring the apparently significant number of Encarta users into a wiki-like Encarta 2.0 that would remain viable today. Now they are left simply selling that many fewer plastic discs with nothing to show.
i haven’t heard of encarta since the pack-in that came with our gateway pentium tower (way back when “gateway” and “tower” meant “not shitty” and “three fucking feet tall”). i remember thinking i was so far ahead of the curve with that cdrom, practically plagiarizing from the future. stupid teachers, still using print sources.
there was some game there too that distracted me once or twice. must have been pretty dull cos i can’t remember anything about except the characters’ silly accents. makes me wonder what’s become of flight simulator.
more on point: seems like microsoft has always just been kind of crippled in that way, like sony (huge and spread thin with internal competing interests). i honestly can’t remember reading about an exciting new idea from microsoft that was realistic or timely enough to actually come to market. every so often i’ll see an article in some waiting room talking about the microsoft house of the future, where there are no more dials or switches or cords because there’s a voice-controlled touchscreen panel in every room! mom can download recipes right to the oven! and the car can check your email! and then a few months later, hey, longhorn dropped half its features. oh, and now they did an ipod clone.
i’m not saying they always have bad ideas. xbox was kinda neat for a first try. but from my memory, even their best ideas were reactionary and predictable. seems like now they’re only around to convince us that we’ll be stuck with them forever. i’m glad the bleak days of the failed anti-monopoly suits are behind us, when it seemed really likely.
i’ve gotten way off track. i guess i’m just saying that encarta’s existence up to now doesn’t surprise me. i know there’s a good analogy here for door-to-door salesmen and encyclopedias and free information, and lots of people out there who know more what they’re talking about have probably said this a lot better than i am. i’m in over my head. but i do hope you write stuff like this more often.
Yeah, the Sony comparison is spot only. Just huge and arrogant and convinced of their own inevitable inevitably.
As you point to, the only time MS has really innovated in recent memory was with the XBox team, which was allowed pretty much total independence. Thus we got XBox Live, which was actually pretty ground-breaking and still the best online console experience by far.
Would you agree that Nintendo and Apple are great examples of what TO DO, in contrast to Vista or PS3 (which Sony is still pricing at a gillion dollars while the Wii and even XBox are kicking its ass at $200)
Re: the Encarta game. I think it was some kind of maze where you had to answer history questions. I definitely remember playing something like that.
Yeah, good post. I always hated the disc encyclopedias when I was a kid because I felt like they should be fun — CDs equaled fun to my child mind — but they were inevitably really boring. It was like getting a tasty-looking snack and discovering it to be dry and tasteless. It’s funny, though, I’ve never really made the obvious comparison between Encarta and Wikipedia (probably because I haven’t thought about Encarta in years). Of course, it’s partly because my sense of what’s “fun” and what isn’t has changed so greatly, but it’s notable how truly fun it is to read Wikipedia. I think the way that its profligate linking stimulates the mind shows how we’re built for curiosity and investigation, and that learning new things becomes “boring” mostly when they lack relevance. Wikipedia’s world of links encourages you to be constantly contextualizing and recontextualizing the information you’re receiving. For that matter, all of those links are perhaps a better metaphor (to sort of borrow from Neil Stephenson’s use of that word) for the way the world itself works than the static, lonely compartments of Encarta. But, i’m too distracted right now to explore that thought much further.
One more thing: I like the graphic you chose above. That was Encarta’s representation of all knowledge: a dolphin! Gandhi! And, to show we’re the Encyclopedia of the Future, an ASTRONAUT!
[...] A note about my Silver Medal Winning comic: it was inspired by a post by hipster tech blogger, Ethan Moore. So congrats to Ethan too! Sadly, there will only be one t-shirt, and I already asked for a [...]
Cool! A pingback! Thanks Alex!
And Benji, Alex isn’t the only winner! You win the Zebra-print sailors cap for best-comment-I-totally-missed-before-activate-email-notifications-for-comments.
Congratulations all!