Microsoft Encarta

» see encarta.msn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

microsoft launched encarta in march 1993 as a multimedia encyclopedia on cd-rom. the source content came from funk & wagnalls, an american print encyclopedia microsoft had bought the rights to in 1989. the multimedia layer was the value-add: video clips, audio recordings, panoramic images, interactive timelines. you double-clicked an entry and got more than just text, which was unusual for software in 1993.

encarta shipped one cd at first, expanded to multiple cds, then to dvd-rom by the late 1990s. each yearly edition added articles and multimedia. by 2001 the encyclopedia had around 50,000 articles plus a large library of clips and maps. mindmaze was a quiz adventure inside the encyclopedia where you wandered through a haunted castle and answered encyclopedia questions to unlock new rooms. some kids played mindmaze more than they used the actual reference.

i used encarta the way every middle schooler in turkey used it. you had a school assignment due. you had a copy of encarta on the family computer. you typed your topic into the search box and you copied two paragraphs into a word document. the teacher rarely asked where the text came from. they probably had a copy at home too.

~ the dossier ~

~ the curtain ~

wikipedia launched in january 2001. for the first few years it was small and error-prone, and nobody took it seriously next to encarta. it had two structural advantages though: it was free, and it grew faster than any commercial encyclopedia could. by 2005 wikipedia had more articles than encarta. by 2007 it had ten times more.

microsoft tried to compete. they added a free online version of encarta at encarta.msn.com. they let users contribute articles. they cut prices on the desktop editions. nothing worked. the structural advantage of free plus crowd-sourced was insurmountable.

on 30 march 2009 microsoft announced the shutdown. they cited "the way people seek and consume information has changed." desktop editions stopped selling on 31 october 2009. the website went dark on 31 december 2009.

~ what it left ~

the cultural reference of the encarta paragraph. for kids who grew up between 1995 and 2005, the muscle memory of opening an entry and copying two paragraphs into a word document is shared by an entire generation. this was your relationship to information before wikipedia. it was paid, curated, packaged in a multimedia frame, and limited to one machine in your house.

the cd-rom era. encarta was the most-installed example of cd-rom software in homes during the late 1990s. when encarta died, the cd-rom encyclopedia category died with it. nobody has tried to revive the format because the model is obsolete.

mindmaze. a small puzzle game inside an encyclopedia is a strange artifact. dozens of forums had threads about mindmaze in the late 1990s. it had its own small fan community. when encarta died mindmaze went with it. some fans have made unofficial recreations.

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