Microsoft Corp. has, on Tuesday, announced its plans to shut its online encyclopedia, Encarta, the largest competitor of the communally-crafted free Internet online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The software giant's online encyclopedia would be closed on October 31. Microsoft will stop selling the software products by June this year. One exception is the Encarta Japan Web site, which will stay live until the last day of this year.
People who have paid for a subscription to MSN Encarta Premium, which offers them access to more information, will get a refund for fees paid beyond April 30, although they'll continue to be able to access the site until it shuts down in October. Microsoft will continue to offer technical support for the software products for three years. The software giant has discontinued a couple of other products recently. Late last year it announced it would stop selling OneCare, its consumer antivirus product. It also killed off a mobile browser research product last year.
In a message posted on the MSN Encarta Web site, Microsoft says, "Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past."
Online, Microsoft offered a limited selection of professionally edited content for free and a larger selection for a subscription. But the offerings paled when compared to those at sites that could use the work of thousands of contributors. Wikipedia, for instance, offers 2.7 million articles in English. Google's Knol, which like Wikipedia depends on user-generated content, has more than 100,000. Encarta has 42,000 entries. Encarta did try to adapt, inviting users to submit suggestions for changes to articles, but those suggestions first had to be checked by a member of the Encarta staff. And Encarta did not allow users to submit new entries.
Yet Encarta itself began to lose ground among users with the rise of Internet search engines like Google that became capable of quickly connecting users to a seemingly infinite array of free online information resources. Among those resources is Wikipedia, a repository of more than 10 million reference articles produced by volunteers in over 260 languages, including more than 75,000 active contributors.
A spokesman for Microsoft declined to comment on whether Wikipedia contributed to Microsoft's decision to shut down Encarta. The spokesman said the move was "one piece of a broader strategy to continue to evolve our product offerings to address the next wave of people's search and research needs."
People who have paid for a subscription to MSN Encarta Premium, which offers them access to more information, will get a refund for fees paid beyond April 30, although they'll continue to be able to access the site until it shuts down in October. Microsoft will continue to offer technical support for the software products for three years. The software giant has discontinued a couple of other products recently. Late last year it announced it would stop selling OneCare, its consumer antivirus product. It also killed off a mobile browser research product last year.
In a message posted on the MSN Encarta Web site, Microsoft says, "Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past."
Online, Microsoft offered a limited selection of professionally edited content for free and a larger selection for a subscription. But the offerings paled when compared to those at sites that could use the work of thousands of contributors. Wikipedia, for instance, offers 2.7 million articles in English. Google's Knol, which like Wikipedia depends on user-generated content, has more than 100,000. Encarta has 42,000 entries. Encarta did try to adapt, inviting users to submit suggestions for changes to articles, but those suggestions first had to be checked by a member of the Encarta staff. And Encarta did not allow users to submit new entries.
Yet Encarta itself began to lose ground among users with the rise of Internet search engines like Google that became capable of quickly connecting users to a seemingly infinite array of free online information resources. Among those resources is Wikipedia, a repository of more than 10 million reference articles produced by volunteers in over 260 languages, including more than 75,000 active contributors.
A spokesman for Microsoft declined to comment on whether Wikipedia contributed to Microsoft's decision to shut down Encarta. The spokesman said the move was "one piece of a broader strategy to continue to evolve our product offerings to address the next wave of people's search and research needs."
No comments:
Post a Comment