April 1, 2009 by Matt Thomas
Now there’s a name I bet you haven’t heard in a while! It may surprise you to know this but up until this year Encarta was still being manufactured and sold by Microsoft. Even in the age of Wikipedia it seems that the world’s premier software manufacturer thought there was a place for the CD Rom Encyclopaedia.
As anyone who went to school in the nineties knows, the software resource used to be one of the staples of Windows, the first and often only stop on the homework research path. Sure, it tended to lead to teachers sifting through thirty identical reports on Martin Luther King for History class, but that was a small price to pay for knowledge.
Anyway, flash forward ten years or so and internet resources like Wikipedia and Google itself have made the programme obsolete. In truth, it’s been that way for years, ever since Broadband really took off and high-speed internet access became feasible for a sizable number of people. Anyway, finally Microsoft has just about woken up to that fact releasing this statement…
‘Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopaedias and reference material has changed.’
There’s nothing like a company with its finger on the pulse, is there?
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