Encarta

After the successes of Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia (1989) and The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (1992),[6] Microsoft initiated Encarta, under the internal codename "Gandalf",[7][8][9][10] by purchasing non-exclusive rights to the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, incorporating it into its first edition in 1993. Funk & Wagnalls continued to publish revised editions for several years independently of Encarta, but ceased printing in the late 1990s.

The name Encarta was created for Microsoft by an advertising agency.[11] It launched in 1993 as a $395 product,[12] although it soon dropped to $99, and was often bundled into the price of a new computer purchase.[13][14][15]

In the late 1990s, Microsoft added content from Collier's Encyclopedia and New Merit Scholar's Encyclopedia from Macmillan into Encarta after purchasing them. Thus the final Microsoft Encarta can be considered the successor of the Funk and Wagnalls, Collier, and New Merit Scholar encyclopedias. None of these formerly successful encyclopedias remained in print for long after being merged into Encarta.

Microsoft introduced several regional versions of Encarta translated into languages other than English. For example, the Brazilian Portuguese version was introduced in 1999 and suspended in 2002.[16] The Spanish version was somewhat smaller than the English one, at 42,000 articles.

In 2000, the full Encarta content became available on the World Wide Web to subscribers, with a subset available for free to anyone.[13] In 2006, Websters Multimedia, a Bellevue, Washington subsidiary of London-based Websters International Publishers, took over maintenance of Encarta from Microsoft.[17] The last version was Encarta Premium 2009, released in August 2008.[2]

Microsoft announced in April 2009 that it would cease to sell Microsoft Student and all editions of Encarta Premium software products worldwide by June 2009, citing changes in the way people seek information, and in the traditional encyclopedia and reference material market, as the key reasons behind the termination.[3] Updates for Encarta were offered until October 2009.[3] Additionally, MSN Encarta web sites were discontinued around October 31, 2009, with the exception of Encarta Japan which was discontinued on December 31, 2009. Existing MSN Encarta Premium (part of MSN Premium) subscribers were refunded.[3]

The demise of Encarta was widely attributed to competition from the free and user-generated Wikipedia,[18][19][20] which grew to be larger than Encarta from its early beginnings in 2001[21] thanks to popularization by web search services like Google.[13] At the time of its closure in 2009, Encarta had about 62,000 articles, most behind a paywall, while the English-language Wikipedia had over 2.8 million articles in open access.

The dynamic maps were generated with the same engine that powered Microsoft MapPoint software. The map was a virtual globe that one could freely rotate and magnify to any location down to major streets for big cities. The globe had multiple surfaces displaying political boundaries, physical landmarks, historical maps and statistical information. One could selectively display statistical values on the globe surface or in a tabular form, different sized cities, various geological or man-made features and reference lines in a map.

The maps contained hyperlinks to related articles ("Map Trek") and also supported a "Dynamic Sensor" that provides the latitude, longitude, place name, population and local time for any point on the globe. Encarta also generated a visible-light moon atlas with names of major craters and hyperlinks. However, it did not include a planetarium, but instead had a small interactive constellation-only map.

In addition to database generated maps, many other illustrative maps in Encarta ("Historical Maps") were drawn by artists. Some more advanced maps were interactive: for example, the large African map for Africana could display information such as political boundaries or the distribution of African flora.

When Encarta was released as part of the "Reference Suite" from 1998 to 2000, Microsoft bundled "Microsoft Bookshelf" with the other programs (Encarta Encyclopedia 98 Deluxe Edition, Encarta Desk Atlas, Encarta Virtual Globe 98, Encarta World English Dictionary, and Encarta Research Organizer).

"Bookshelf" was discontinued in 2000, and in later Encarta editions (Encarta Reference Suite 2000 and onward), "Bookshelf" was replaced with a dedicated Encarta Dictionary, a superset of its printed version, The Encarta World English Dictionary (later Encarta Webster's Dictionary).[28]

There was some controversy over the decision, since the dictionary lacks the other books provided in "Bookshelf" which many found to be a useful reference, such as Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (replaced with a quotations section in Encarta that links to relevant articles and people) and an Internet Directory (although many of the sites listed in offline directories no longer exist).

Print versions of Encarta dictionaries have also been published, including:

• Encarta World English Dictionary (St Martin's Press, ISBN 031222222-X/ISBN 978-031222222-2)
• Bloomsbury English Dictionary

• Second edition (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, ISBN 074756243-1/ISBN 978-074756243-6)[29]

• Microsoft Encarta Dictionary: The first dictionary for the Internet age (St. Martin's Paperbacks, ISBN 031298362-X/ISBN 978-031298362-8)
• Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary: The First Dictionary For The Internet Age (St. Martin's Press, ISBN 031228087-4/ISBN 978-031228087-1)
• Encarta Webster's College Dictionary of the English Language

• Second edition (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, ISBN 158234510-4/ISBN 978-158234510-9)[30]

• Encarta Webster's College Dictionary

• Second edition (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, ISBN 1-59691-085-2/ISBN 978-1-59691-085-0)[31]

Robert McHenry, while Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica, criticized Encarta for differences in factual content between national versions of Encarta, accusing Microsoft of "pandering to local prejudices" instead of presenting subjects objectively.[32] An article written by Bill Gates addressed the nature of writing encyclopedias for different regions.[33]

Early in 2005, Encarta's editor-in-chief at the time, Gary Alt, announced that the online Encarta started to allow users to suggest changes to existing articles.[34]

Encarta's content was accessible using a conversational interface on Windows Live Messenger via the MSN Bot "Encarta Instant Answers".[35] The bot could answer many encyclopedia related questions directly in the IM window. It used short sentences from the Encarta website, and sometimes displays full articles in the Internet Explorer-based browser on the right. It also could complete simple mathematical and advanced algebra problems. This service was also available in German,[36] Spanish,[37] French[38] and Japanese.[39]

Each summer (in the Northern hemisphere) or winter (in the Southern hemisphere), Microsoft published a new version of Encarta. However, despite the inclusion of news-related and some supplementary articles, Encarta's contents had not been changed substantially in its later years. Besides the yearly update, the installed offline copy could be updated over the Internet for a certain period for free depending on the edition. Some articles (usually about 2,000) were updated to reflect important changes or events. When the update period expired, an advertisement prompting to upgrade to the new version was displayed to the user occasionally.