Encarta dies a quiet death

Ah, everyone has had the experience – a new PC and buttloads of worthless software included. Discs and discs of CDs – most of them crap. But included in that ream of junk was Microsoft’s Encarta – an encyclopedia right on my own computer. The idea was kind of cool. At least it felt kind of cool. But like all CDs, it suffered from the same thing newspapers suffer from nowadays – an inability to stay up with the times.

20 years ago the concept was fine – we got our news and information from printed material. A set of encyclopedias was a big purchase for a family. They would be used for years to come by kids doing research for school projects. A CD of such material only seemed to be a logical extension – compact and up-to-date (at least for that year).

But like so many newspapers, Encarta failed to realize that the Internet was revolutionizing how people digested news and information. No site understood it better than Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia where updates are only a moment away. People discovered very quickly that they could find information on subjects from a variety of sources instantly. You were no longer stuck with Britannica’s or Encarta’s version of the world. And you certainly weren’t stuck with information that was out of date by months – or – gasp – even years.

And so millions of Microsoft Encarta software discs are but memories – just like Encarta itself.