It became so popular that its logo and the sound of their intros They became two brands just as identifiable as those of Nokia or Windows. If – like the person writing this – you had to go to school or high school between the second half of the 90s and the first half of the 2000s, talk about the Encarta It does not require large presentations.
If not, don’t worry; It won’t take us much time. Before Wikipedia offered free online knowledge and even the use of the Internet became popular, Microsoft launched a digital encyclopedia that revolutionized the sector and became a phenomenon between more or less 1993 and 2009. Its name: Encarta.
Today, ironies of history, “Encarta” is one more entry in the index of other encyclopedias; but there was a time when it transformed our way of accessing knowledge. From having to spend their eyelashes and fingertips scrolling through pages in search of information, students began to search for information with the click of a button. The Encarta offered an agile, comfortable and above all didactic way to satisfy curiosity.
With articles, yes; but also with videos, audios and even virtual visits and games. You could read about Nepalese temples in the Salvat. Or open the Encarta and “tour” one.
Its “pull” was so great that it put the old paper encyclopedias in trouble. When the Spanish edition was presented in early 1997, those responsible presumed that the Encarta CD-ROM, a format that you could store in a drawer or even a folder, contained information that It was equivalent to 29 volumes and 1.2 meters of shelving. Not only that. The Encarta cost 24,900 pesetas, four times less than an equivalent printed encyclopedia.
To make matters worse, his landing in Spain was protected by Santillanaa publishing house with considerable weight in school classrooms. How to compete with that? The product was liked and published in Spanish and other languages. He did well until, with the same ones with which he had become a phenomenon, ended up succumbing to the competition. In a way, his success is due to his good sense of smell in the 90s; its decline, to the inability to adapt in the 2000s.
This is your story.
Objective: reinvent the old encyclopedias
In the mid-1980s Microsoft He began to think about the idea of creating a digital encyclopedia. The idea was ambitious. Those from Redmond wanted, neither more nor less, to rethink the concept and operation of a product apparently as mature and closed as the volumes that publishers’ commercials were dedicated to selling door to door.
To make its debut in a big way, the multinational tried to negotiate a license with the creators of what was probably the most respected publication internationally: the Encyclopædia Britannica. It didn’t go well for them.
In the 1980s, paper volumes of Britannica were sold and They left huge profits. As Enrique Dans remembershis books cost about $250 to produce and the selling price ranged between $1,500 and $2,200, depending on the quality. Why would the firm want to digitize content on a CD and risk killing the goose that lays the golden eggs?
Microsoft did not give up and looked for ways to move the idea forward. He even had a name for the initiative: Project Gandalf. Some time later he closed a contract with Funk & Wagnalls to use your New Encyclopediaof 29 volumes, in a database that was created at the end of that same decade. To complete its contents, years later two other McMillan encyclopedias would be added, the Collier’s and New Merit Scholar. They were not the Britannica; but it would have to do.
However, doubts arose in Redmond about whether or not the project was viable and they decided to park it. It was resumed at the turn of the decade, in 1991, when Microsoft decided to go all out. In 1993, the first edition of the Encarta Encyclopedia was launched, which included the 25,000 Funk & Wagnalls articles and extra material, such as images and some animations.
The tool was comfortable, much more agile than the kilometric tomes and even fun, but it started with a huge mistake: the shot was centered wrong. At the beginning of the 90s there were still many houses without a PC and the marketing price was exclusive. When it came out, the Encarta cost about $400, which greatly limited its range. The cost deterred customers and was not too far from that of another competitor that was testing the same niche with a recognizable brand, Compton, which also launched your own multimedia version in 1990, with text and supports such as images and sounds.
In Redmond they knew how to react and soon they were deploying a more aggressive strategy. They launched promotions that allowed you to get the Encarta for 99 dollarsthey included their CD with the Windows software package and negotiated with manufacturers to incorporate it into their computers, a tactic not unlike that used with Windows and Office. The promotion of Microsoft itself gave the final push. The new encyclopedia gained fame and began to chain editions, translate into different languages and enrich content with multimedia supports.
In 1995, abridged versions of some articles were offered for Microsoft Network ISP subscribers, and starting in ’96, standard and deluxe editions began to be released, an enriched version that could be updated month by month.
In 1998, its creators went one step further and acquired the rights to several electronic encyclopedias. The product was growing and, above all, it demonstrated that the sector was experiencing a clear paradigm shift. The best example: in 1996 the once powerful company Britannica ended up underselling for their difficulties.
“It allows young and old to explore the world by themes and characters,” their promoters boasted in the Spanish market. And so it was, indeed. Through articles, photos, illustrations, graphs, maps, timelines, recordings, videos and even virtual tours, Encarta won over an entire generation of students. Until it was stamped with one of the great and inexorable maxims of the market: Why pay for content if you have a free alternative?
The blow of Wikipedia
After releasing editions since 1993, developing special versions aimed at childrenfocused on mathematics or African history – among others – and enriching its resources with music, dictionaries, recordings, maps, animations… It came to an end. The reason: another clear change of times that, on this occasion, caught Microsoft on the wrong foot.
In 2001 Jimmy Wales and Larry Sangers they launched Wikipediaa collaborative, educational and, most important of all, online encyclopedia, free and very easy to access through search engines like Google.
Wikipedia had its handicaps, of course. The main one—especially in its origins—was that content control was much less rigorous than that of Encarta. In his fight with Microsoft, this weakness did not seem to affect him too much. The new formula, completely open and democratizing both access to content and its creation, ended up convincing the public and forced those from Redmond to rethink your strategy.
Its price was reduced to $29.95 and was often included in offers shared with other products. Seeing that neither one way nor the other served to maintain the brand, in April 2005 Microsoft made a risky move.
In an attempt to emulate the strengths of the Wikipedia model, those from Redmond requested the collaboration of their readers. Their proposal was that they participate in updating and creating articles, only with a slightly different model to that of the Wales and Sangers platform. To mark distances with Wikipedia, it was decided that its contents would be supervised at an editorial level.
The measure could be a guarantee of rigor and quality; but in practice it meant that authors who were willing to collaborate risked seeing their texts end up in the drawer. Not to mention that the work was free and Microsoft, a multinational millionaire turnover.
That didn’t work, nor did the lowering of the product or the attempts to promote the brand. Another strategy without great results was the creation of the online edition of Encarta in 2000, a new version that initially offered a freemium model: It offered part of its content for free and required you to pay for the CD or a downloadable package if you wanted to complete it with the rest of the material.
Neither one nor the other. In 2008, its English edition added a whopping 68,000 items —43,000 in Spanish—, an outrage when compared to paper encyclopedias, but nothing when you take into account the about 300,000 from the Spanish Wikipedia that same year.
Result: in 2009 Microsoft accepted its defeat and threw in the towel. In March, those responsible announced their intention to eliminate the website between October and December of that same year. The winds of change that had favored it in the 90s made it shipwreck in the 21st century. “The traditional category of encyclopedias and reference materials has changed,” he lamented.
Perhaps the best epitaph of his disappearance is the one that Bloomberg dedicated to him on March 30, 2009, when the editor who wrote the chronicle of his end—titled “Goodbye, Encarta”— admitted that he had gotten the information about that old Microsoft product from… Wikipedia!
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