as earlier reported by various tech news sites, microsoft’s encarta is going the way of the dodo bird. wikipedia might have played a role in encarta’s demise as suggested by others but wikipedia’s popularity is given too much credit. wikipedia didn’t play a significant role in shutting down encarta; broadband killed encarta.
encarta was brought to market in the early/mid 90s just as cd drives were becoming affordable. anyone remember the MPC (multimedia pc) consortium? back then, mass information about everything had to be stored on cd as dial up access was the predominant way to access the internet (in extreme limited fashion), the web was still a toy, and not everyone was online yet. people bought the yearly updates for the encyclopedia on a disc (encarta, grolier, and some other one i forget) because it was relatively cheap and it was an extremely efficient and easy way to have the latest information at your finger tips.
in the late 90s and early 2000s broadband (and by extension the web) was gaining acceptance in american households. with the wealth of information online, who needed to buy the early update of the encyclopedia on disc? instead of having one authoritative source for everything, there are millions of authoritative sources, each with their own area of expertise!
other factors leading to the decline of encarta:
