Encarta
The encyclopedia on a CD, killed by a website
Encarta was Microsoft's multimedia encyclopedia, launched in 1993 on CD-ROM and for years the reason many families bought a computer. It destroyed the print encyclopedia business, then was destroyed in turn by Wikipedia; Microsoft discontinued it in 2009.
Timeline [edit]
- 1993
-
March 1993
Launch
Encarta ships on CD-ROM
Multimedia articles, audio and an interactive atlas for a fraction of a print set.
- 1995
-
1995
Peak
Best-selling encyclopedia in the world
Bundled with new PCs; print encyclopedia sales collapse.
- 2001
-
15 January 2001
Decline
Wikipedia launches
A free, live encyclopedia begins its climb.
- 2005
-
October 2005
Feature
Encarta opens to reader submissions
A late attempt to answer Wikipedia's model.
- 2008
-
2008
Decline
62,000 articles versus millions
The scale gap with Wikipedia becomes impossible to argue with.
- 2009
-
30 March 2009
Shutdown announced
Microsoft announces the end
"The category of traditional encyclopedias has changed."
-
31 October 2009
Shutdown
MSN Encarta sites close
Software was withdrawn in June; Japan follows in December.
How it looked [edit]
The site through time
Browse encarta.msn.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:
Ownership [edit]
Why it shut down [edit]
Official line: Microsoft said "the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed" and discontinued Encarta: the software in June 2009 and the MSN Encarta websites on 31 October 2009.
Our analysis: Encarta did to print encyclopedias exactly what Wikipedia then did to Encarta, only faster. A paid, professionally edited, annually updated disc could not compete with a free encyclopedia that updated every minute and covered a hundred times more topics.
History [edit]
The disc that killed the bookshelf
Encarta shipped in March 1993, built on content Microsoft licensed from Funk & Wagnalls after Encyclopaedia Britannica turned the company down. For a fraction of the price of a printed set it offered tens of thousands of articles, plus something books could not do at all: audio clips, video, animations, an interactive atlas, and the MindMaze trivia game that a generation played instead of doing homework.
It worked. Britannica's print sales collapsed through the 1990s, the door-to-door encyclopedia salesman went extinct, and by the early 2000s Encarta was the best-selling encyclopedia brand in the world, bundled with new PCs and updated every year.
Outrun by amateurs
Wikipedia launched in 2001, and within a few years the comparison was brutal: Encarta 2008 had roughly 62,000 articles; English Wikipedia had over two million, free, updated continuously. Microsoft tried opening Encarta to reader submissions, and even ran a free ad-supported web version, but a curated annual product cannot race a live one.
On 30 March 2009 Microsoft announced the end. The software was withdrawn in June 2009, the MSN Encarta sites closed on 31 October 2009 (Japan followed at the end of the year), and the most successful commercial encyclopedia of the digital era was gone in seven months. The irony was noted everywhere at the time: to read about Encarta's demise, most people went to Wikipedia.
Similar projects
Sources [edit]
- Victim Of Wikipedia: Microsoft To Shut Down Encarta Forbes 30 March 2009 [archived]
- Microsoft To Shutter Encarta, Read All About It On Wikipedia TechCrunch 30 March 2009 [archived]
Last verified: 11 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).