"My job is to gather and publish good contents. I know
how much work goes into creating and publishing material. This news
must have been quite hard to digest for people who have been
working on Encarta for a while. The two main questions that come to
mind, however, are: "Why?", and more importantly, "What about the
contents?"
"When it came out, Encarta was both courageous and innovative.
Microsoft had some serious cash back then, and was trying to find
new ways of exploiting technologies in "cool" ways. It was actually
a decent encyclopaedia which competed with the more established
(and very expensive) ones.
"Then, years passed and the world changed quite drastically. The
Internet became reality, and Wikipedia was created. Some can say
that Wikipedia killed Encarta. To me, it's more like "free
licensing and the internet community killed Encarta". Compare
Encarta's 62,000 entries with Wikipedia's 2,700,000 articles. And
it's not just about numbers, but quality: having used both of them,
I feel I can say that Wikipedia is simply better. Much better. And
more current. The reason is simple: Encarta wasn't better than
Wikipedia because it couldn't afford to be."
