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Wikipedia Didn't Kill Brittanica — Encarta Did
rudy_wayne writes "The end of Encyclopedia Britannica has been widely reported and its demise has been blamed on Wikipedia. However, this article at Wired points out that the real reason is something entirely different. 'In 1990 Britannica had $650 million in revenue. In 1996, long before Wikipedia existed, it was bankrupt and the entire company was sold for $135 million. What happened in between was Encarta. Even though Encarta didn't make money for Microsoft and Britannica produced its own encyclopedia CDs, Encarta was an inexpensive, multimedia encyclopedia that helped Microsoft sell Windows PCs to families. And once you had a PC in the living room or den where the encyclopedia used to be, it was all over for Mighty Britannica. It's not that Encarta made knowledge cheaper, it's that technology supplanted its role as a purchasable 'edge' for over-anxious parents. They bought junior a new PC instead of a Britannica. When Wikipedia emerged five years later, Britannica was already a weakened giant. It wasn't a free and open encyclopedia that defeated its print edition. It was the personal computer itself.'"
It's nice to finally see a slashdot article that blames Microsoft for something.
I still have my Encarta CDs. Does that mean I'm harboring a murderer?
[citation needed]
Have gnu, will travel.
LOL, he sure has your number.
I remember being at a trade fair of some sort shortly after Encarta came out. I had a copy and immediately saw that multimedia versions would eventually kill the paper version.
So I asked the Brittanica rep when they would have their electronic version out, and the attitude was literaly "its a passing fad, people we will always want the book version".
I think that phrase "its a passing fad" should almost qualify as investment advice. take a hard look at the passing fads, and buy in early! or even better, short the company that claims their threat is a passing fad.
I doubt this. Encarta wasn't all that useful to me when it could have been. I still went to paper encyclopedias or used search engines. Now wikipedia has replaced both avenues. But Encarta wasn't even on the list. I looked at it a few times and couldn't take ti seriously as a resource.
Microsoft first plan was to produce a digital Encyclopedia Brittanica, but the guys at "Encyclopedia Brittanica" declined, therefore they Brittanica killed Birttanica.
Source: I'm old and I remember that happening.
Maybe if you bought one you would know at least how to spell its name. It's “Britannica”, for your information.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I would argue that Encarta, rather than supplanting encylopedia's in people's houses showed how unnecessary they are (which was confirmed by Wikipedia).
I confess to buying a couple of copies of Encarta, looking through them and seeing that they were okay - not as good as a set of Encyclopedia Britannica but you could toodle around and look up stuff. But, I was always disappointed in Encarta's depth of information as well as the limited pictures and videos (which were why you were supposed to buy the darn thing in the first place). So, it fell into disuse pretty quickly and the kids used the library for their projects (which is arguably where they should have been doing it in the first place). People got out of the habit of looking to an encyclopedia in the home.
Then along came Wikipedia which really fulfills the promise of a computer based encylopedia with links to images, videos, references you could cite/confirm, etc. which reduced an encyclopedia's usefulness to just being raw materials for quirky leather bound furniture.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
If only Britannica would have patented cataloging a large amount of factual information in an indexed fashion...
For the time, both Microsoft Encarta and Microsoft Dinosaurs were pretty cool products. I've still got the CDs somewhere, although they don't do much on my Mac.
Now the upselling-bait-and-switch tactics Microsoft tried to pull on us Encarta customers was quite another matter, and was one of a long line of things that eventually led to my flight from the Windows platform. But the products themselves were both fun and useful.
#DeleteChrome
Depite the headline on TFS, TFA (and even the body of TFS) says the PC displaced the print encyclopedia, not that electronic encyclopedias, or any particular one of them, did. Encarta is mentioned as one factor that helped Microsoft promote the Windows PC in this niche, but the contention isn't that Encarta displaced Britannica as a source of knowledge but that the personal computer displaced the print encyclopedia as a parental purchase.
Hmmm, I've seen this situation somewhere else in the world...
It was Mosaic and other web browsers that sold PCs from 1993 onward, not Encarta.
From what I remember, in 1996 the vast majority of web pages were just peoples' lists of links to other peoples' web pages (which in themselves were just lists of links...). There were a few islands of usefulness, but a lot of THAT was still clunky web interfaces to Gopher resources or the CIA Worldbook - not the sort of thing the typical consumer was likely to be using.
#DeleteChrome
Not everyone had internet acces in 1993.... I didn't get online until 1998.
Before that (1998), we had two copies of Encarta. I had the first version for Windows 95/3.1 and then Encarta 97. I thought it was cool hearing the sounds a dolphin made on my computer in the first version of Encarta. I got hooked on it and would look through its articles and pictures. I even used it many times for my school work before I learned to use the Internet.
Encarta was an essential software bundle for the home PC for families during the mid 90s.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
I tried to by Britannica CD in 90s. They were charging almost as much as paper edition. It was only in early 2000s when they realized the error of their ways.
They could have sewn up the encyclopedia market but their high price was unjustifiable in the light of substantially cheaper offerings such as Encarta.
Sure, Encarta is not as good as Britannica but it's good enough for most kids. This is the key point: good enough is the enemy of perfect.
That's what the article said. The Slashdot summary was misleading.
I remember being a kid begging my parents to Brittanica only to hear over and over again that they couldn't afford it.
Not for mom and pop. There was no useful information on the web until later in the 90's, and no advertising of website URLs on TV or print media until at least 1996. Encarta and other information CDs were the bee's knees back then, because a lot of people never bothered with Internet access.
Even though my family owned a full set of Encyclopedia Brittanica and Comptons, I don't feel too bad for them. EB later turned out to be a Patent Troll. I used to work for one of the Defendants in their bizzare lawsuits on GPS manufacturers. http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2008/11/encyclopaedia-britannica-patent-lawsuit.html Apparently, if you search a CD you are stealing their IP or something.
But it didn't even have to be Encarta or any electronic encyclopedia that did it.
The market for encyclopedias at that time was probably almost exactly the same market for PCs, middle-class families willing to make a large one-time expenditure to help with their kids future (or their own).
The PC was new and held the same promise that it would inform and educate your kids so they could grow up to be smarter and more successful. The fact that something like Encarta was available for it was simply icing on the cake, but people would probably have chosen the cake anyway.
The Encyclopedia was old-and-busted and the PC was teh-new-hotness and their customers could only afford one or the other. Sure, rich people could buy both, but that wasn't how EB made their money. They sold "the larger world and knowledge and the future" to greater middle-class america, and the computer was those things made incarnate and so I suspect everyone who had a nagging feeling that maybe an Encyclopedia would be something they should buy replaced it with a nagging feeling that they really ought to buy a computer, and the rest is as they say, history.
G.
I think most of information in the summary can also be found here: :-)
- Encarta
- Encyclopædia Britannica
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I think that phrase "its a passing fad" should almost qualify as investment advice. take a hard look at the passing fads, and buy in early! or even better, short the company that claims their threat is a passing fad.
Brittanica likely suffered from the same internal conflict of interest that contributed to the demise of Polaroid and Kodak. Individuals within the companies may have had the foresight to understand what was about to happen, but encountered two different types of roadblock. The Britannica rep was a good example of the first type.
The second type though, was the more lethal one -- a management that did understand the threat, but whose primary concern was ensuring that the company did not end up competing with itself. By the time they were forced by external forces, it was already too late.
Find some old encyclopedias, A set from each of the following years: 1920, 1930, 1940, 1950, 1960 and so on
Look up the following in each set:
Israel
Communist
Transistor
Ku Klux Klan
Nazi
Steel
In 1993 computers were still disgustingly expensive ($2000+ with a monitor), and that was for a 386 that would choke on anything but text pages (in terms of online rendering). Modems were still incredibly slow and internet providers outside academia were incredibly hard to come by (most people used AOL). In this time period people were mostly buying computers, recognizing that they couldn't do anything fun without upgrading to a CD-ROM and a sound card, and upgrading with a Multimedia kit and playing The Seventh Guest and mucking around on Encarta (included in most upgrade kits).
You're thinking of the time frame of 1996 onwards, when people actually had more powerful processors to choose from (486 or Pentium-based PCs), faster modems became inexpensive (14.4 and faster), and real consumer internet providers began to surface.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
When I was a kid, my parents bought a very expensive set of hardback encyclopedias. When I got my second PC Clone, it came with a free copy of Encarta.
One day, I needed to do a report and cite references, so I looked up the same entries in each. They were absolutely identical.
Crap as it may be, it was the same as paper encyclopedias when it first came out, except that it also had video.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I was acquainted with some people at Britannica in the 80s and 90s, and others in publishing (not well enough acquainted to be a leak, just to form an opinion that might have value). It seemed to me that Britannica was stuck on being the encyclopedia that everyone wished they could afford, rather than the encyclopedia that everyone used. Similar things happened in other domains where the effective price point changed suddenly. You go from being the dominant choice in a small but expensive market to being almost nobody's choice in a much larger and much cheaper market.
I think that it's the same phenomenon that killed Apollo. They had the best (pretty much only) desktop research computer workstation, only affordable by very well funded labs. SUN Microsystems offered a much cheaper, inferior box, running a UNIX that was not yet as well engineered as the Apollo proprietary system. But the new, cheaper box, and the preponderance of UNIX on research minicomputers, provided a UNIX solution for almost everybody. Soon, even those who could afford Apollo found it more effective to buy lots of UNIX instead of a little bit of Apollo. I remember an almost tearful Apollo engineer, toward the end, promising that they were finally going to provide UNIX and cut their price. It was too late.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
I suppose this would be the modern equivalent? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
This article is very true. At the time Encarta came out I was working for a company that sold PCs. We were located in an area where there were many affluent African American families. Not being raciest by any means, but typically all we had to do was bring up the article on Martin Luther King and start the "dream" speech video and they just had to have that for their kids. Encarta sold the computer.
load "linux",8,1
You obviously don't remember the '90s very well. Multimedia was the selling point. Remember the MPC1 and MPC2 specs? Every computer came with a CD ROM drive and a sound card. A lot didn't come with a modem. Windows 95 even shipped without a web browser, but you can bet most computers from the time were bundled with Encarta, Thompson or similar. In 1993, you could probably have put most of the contents of the web on a single CD.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If only Britannica would have patented cataloging a large amount of factual information in an indexed fashion...
They did. And then they became a patent troll and sued dozens of companies. Any then they lost and never recovered any money.
http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2008/11/encyclopaedia-britannica-patent-lawsuit.html
http://www.brinkshofer.com/news_events/2571-federal-circuit-affirms-summary-judgment-brinks-client-alpine-encyclopaedia
Which I grabbed opportunistically at a library sale.
It calls itself "A New Survey of Universal Knowledge," and the founding date of 1768 is easier to find than the revision date.
Israel, quoted in entirety: "ISRAEL, the national designation of the Jews. The Hebrew name means "God strives" or "rules" (see Gen. xxxii. 28; and the allusion in Hosea xii. 4). It was borne by their ancestor, Jacob, the father of the 12 tribes. For some centuries the term was applied to the northern kingdom, as distinct from Judah, although the feeling of national unity extended it so as to include both."
Communist: no entry. There is an entry of 2+ pages on "COMMUNISM, a term often loosely used to denote different systems of social organization aiming at common property of the means of production, or at an equal distribution of weath and income, or at both. ..." The bulk of the article refers to the Russian revolution and subsequent communist government. It is fairly free with the author's negative opinion of Russian communism.
Ku Klux Klan: about 1 page. "KU KLUX KLAN. There have been two distinct organizations of this name in American history. The first Ku Klux Klan was an outgrowth of the tense feeling in the South during the reconstruction period succeeding the Civil War; the second was organized during the World War and attained is greatest strength in the period of social and economic readjustment which followed the restoration of peace. ..." I find this article more objective in tone than the one on communism. It refers to the "scalawags" and "carpet baggers," and appears to accept the view of an over-reaching reconstruction, and refers to the first Klan as "a more or less successful revolution against the reconstruction and an overthrow of the governments based on negro suffrage or 'Carpetbag' government."
Nazi: about 1/3 page. "NAZI, a popular abbreviation for a member of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workingmen's party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, commmonly designated by its initials, NSDAP). ..." More objective in tone than the article on Communism, similar in tone to the one on Ku Klux Klan. I can't resist the last sentence: "Today, just as Christians draw their faith from the Bible and the words of Jesus, so Nazis find the expression of their faith and beliefs in Hitler's book,My Battle (Mein Kampf), and in his speeches and decrees."
Steel: only a reference to subsections. "STEEL: see Iron and Steel; Wire Rope; Bessemer Steel; Structural Engineering; Open Hearth Steel; High Speed Steel; Manganese Steel; Molybdenum Steel; Mushet Steel; Nickel Steel; Nickel Chromium Steel; Tool Steel; Tungsten Steel; Vanadium Steel; Nitrogen Hardening; Stainless Steel; Steels, Alloy; Alloys; Pressed Metal; Sheets, Iron and Steel; and other specific headings." "STEELS, ALLOY" covers more than 3 pages.
Transistor: no entry. I really checked, just to be sure. One should always confirm the obvious, since the surprise value of a contradiction would be so great. The enclopedia goes from "TRANSFORMER" (the electrical kind) directly to "TRANSIT CIRCLE or MERIDIAN CIRCLE." (Notice that I quoted the previous and following entries sorta like a DNS response for a nonexistent entry.)
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
Facts aren't up to a vote.
If we let people vote on what was real, there was a period of time where we might have voted to say that 9/11 was an inside job.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
By 10th grade we weren't allowed to cite encyclopedias ... had to have Primary Sources.
Regardless of what the founder believes, Wikipedia should have monetized the website with the "subtle" use of advertising which would have generated billions in revenue over the past decade.
Wikipedia could have then bought Brittanica/Encarta and re purposed the authors and developers to write decent articles, perform fact finding research, and moderate articles to help improve the site. It would have been win-win for both: Brittanica would have entered a new era of real time information and Wikipedia would have gained valuable resources to improve content.
Instead, Brittanica is now bankrupt and the founder of Wikipedia begs for change yearly to run his website.
I don't find Wikipedia particularly good. It lacks rich content and interactivity, is woefully poor on facts and most articles are purely subjective. Its a glorified blog, period. The website is run on a dollar store budget and lacks any real innovation and the website has been stagnant for a decade.
Bottom line is, someone had a good idea 10 years ago and has done nothing since to expand, improve, or re-invigorate that idea.
I don't care for what moral purpose the founder of Wikipedia chose not to monetize Wikipedia; Google never charged people a dime and provided what today would be considered essential services to the Internet. So why the hell couldn't Wikipedia? Even if the founder gave all his money away (and honestly, isn't giving millions to charity BETTER then begging for change?), just keep enough money to run your website and re-invest back in evolving and innovating.
When I see those stupid beg "ads" and long diatribes about what wonderful service Wikipedia provides to the world it is just a reminder to all that an idiot with morals is still an idiot.
I think if you look up "clown" in Wikipedia, the founder's face should probably be shown. He killed the competition full of rich, "factful" content in place of a dollar store product that won't evolve because of cheap and lazy development and a founder that has tunnel vision. He is a one hit wonder that has taken far to much credit and not given anything back.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
... , because the one thing you really want when buying a shelf of useless books is even more useless books to litter your coffee table.
I really cannot think of any occasion where the two-paragraph overview from a printed encyclopedia ever helped me accomplish anything. If I needed to study something specific, I went to the library and borrowed a few books on the topic. Encyclopedias are what you read when you don't really care all that much about the subject.
I pity anyone whose knowledge of the pre-web role of encyclopedias is limited to the poster's comment.
In 1968, my parents acquired a set of Enclopaedia Britannica ( == Yes that is the correct spelling). This was just prior to my experiencing a soccer injury that would confine me to bed for most of the next two years. I spent most of that time reading EB. (Yes, I also went to the library every week.) My time with EB did more to prepare me for college than any other single aspect of my high school education.
(And I came from a household that housed more than a thousand books and multiple sets of competing encyclopedias as well.)
Your "two paragraph" assertion is misleading. I still remember reading a biography of Rene Descarte that went on for pages. The article on World War II was even longer. Also, encyclopedias were never meant to be one's only source of information. Just a "jumping off" point in case the reader needed a starting point. This is the same way Wikipedia is used today. Need basic information? Use Wiki. Need more? That is what the iPad, Kindle, Nook, and the library are for.
Many years later, EB became one of my clients. It was during that experience that I learned that almost every article was written by a college professor likely to be an authority on the subject and proofread by another prior to publication. That many articles were also written by experts in their field (i.e. Albert Einstein authored an article on Physics in one edition) is also overlooked by the poster.
When my own daughters needed a resource in the early eighties, I did buy the Encarta, Grolier, and much later, the Britannica discs. In the internet age, my sons have no need for any of these.
But just to rant because one did not sit still, read, and appreciate this wonderful resource for what it was, is more a reflection on the poster and less a reflection on the value of such tools prior to the internet.
'nuff said.
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
My family had a computer for years (the first was a 286 around 1987) and about 1992 bought a fancy new 486 from Gateway. It was an even bigger day when Dad got us a 4X CD-ROM drive to replace the 1X that the computer came with. About the time we switched to Windows 95, Dad bought a copy of Encarta. Over the next few years, one or two more versions were purchased. We also got a copy of Encyclopaedia Britannica (don't ask me when) and one of something made by Grolier before the acquistion by Scholastic. My parents weren't against large volumes of printed references (they own a condensed OED) but Dad saw the potential of the CD format (DVD as well) right away. The fact that Encarta was much cheaper was a bonus.
According to wikipedia, Compton's was the first multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedia. I think we had a copy of it, too.
Do you have a primary source for that information?
I read through all the head matter, and found no details on the timeliness of the material. The "Editor's Preface" brags about the timeliness ("the Britannica is never old"), but gives no careful details. Individual articles have no dates.
The edition with the 1946 copyright has an article on "WORLD WAR II" mentioning dates all the way up to the Japanese surrender "On Sept. 2, 1945." It mentions that "U.S. armed forces began to land ... to assume their occupation duties."
The KU KLUX KLAN entry mentions "the World War," but it didn't need to be updated after the destruction of the 2d Klan. The WORLD WAR II entry has information on the Nazi party more timely than the information in the NAZI entry. But the NAZI entry does not cite any other article for more information.
I still like djl's longtitudinal comparison idea a lot (some other entries, eh? ...), but the skew between different entries makes it more complicated. We're getting a snapshot of the presentation of a given topic before a given time, distorted by the priority with which it was revised. Lovely problem in signal separation. I wonder whether the bad odor surrounding the Nazi party was strong enough to make neglect preferable to revision. It will (assuming someone posts it) be interesting to compare to later NAZI entries.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
Wikipedia NOR Britannica are citable sources. EVER. Nor any other encyclopedia.
This is not entirely true: entries in some encyclopedias are credited with specific authors, and in some cases do represent a citable opinion, or even citable, factual results of research. These "entries" are essentially "articles." This is not true for Britannica or Wikipedia, but is true for many, many encyclopedias in many fields.
The problem of citation in encyclopedias, wikipedia, and even the web at large, is that of authority. If you can't trace the author, then you have no way of evaluating the authority and validity of the cited text.
I got Encarta (maybe it was a lite version) bundled with my first laptop, that'd have been about 1996.
I think I still have the CD somewhere. I'll dig it out and see how many planets it thinks there are.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."