Encarta Helped Kill Britannica. Then Wikipedia Did the Same to Encarta.

Every kid who did a book report between about 1994 and 2004 has the same muscle memory: the double-click, the little loading chime, and then a screen that was somehow both an encyclopedia and a toy. You could spin a globe with your mouse. You could click a lion and hear it roar, click a foreign flag and hear the anthem, click a president and watch a grainy video of him talking. There was a game — MindMaze — where you walked through a haunted castle answering trivia questions to open the next door, and if you were a certain kind of nine-year-old you played it instead of doing the report you'd opened it for.

That was Encarta, and for a brief, shining window it was the future of knowing things. Then the future changed its mind.

The snub that started itBritannica said no to the disc

The story starts, as these stories often do, with somebody powerful being too proud to see it coming. In 1985, Microsoft went to Encyclopædia Britannica — the gold standard, the leather-bound, gilt-edged set your fanciest friend's parents kept in a special cabinet — and proposed putting it on a CD-ROM. Britannica said no. A disc felt beneath a two-hundred-year-old institution that sold $1,000-plus sets door to door, on installment plans, closed by salesmen in your living room. Encyclopedias were furniture. They were a statement. You did not put a statement on a plastic disc that came free in a cereal box of software.

So Microsoft went and licensed the encyclopedia nobody bragged about: Funk & Wagnalls, the budget set sold a volume at a time by the supermarket checkout. It wasn't prestigious. It was available. Microsoft poured it into a database, wrapped it in audio and video and that clickable globe, and in March 1993 shipped it as Encarta — the whole of human knowledge, more or less, for the price of a video game, on a disc that weighed nothing.

Side B: the killHow free ate the future

Here is the part Britannica didn't survive. Encarta didn't just undercut them — it was often free, bundled onto the hard drive of every new family PC as a reason to buy the computer. Why pay $995 for Britannica's own belated CD-ROM, or ten times that for the shelf of books, when the machine came with a perfectly good encyclopedia that also sang?

The numbers are brutal in sequence. Britannica, which had moved sets by the hundreds of thousands in its prime, sold roughly 51,000 print sets in 1994 — less than half of what it had managed four years earlier. In 1995 the company was put up for sale. The salesmen, the installment plans, the special cabinet — an entire American institution folded, quietly, because a software company gave away a better-packaged version of the same idea.

And Microsoft knew exactly what it had built, which is the strangest and most honest thing in the whole story. Tom Corddry, who ran Microsoft's multimedia division, said it plainly:

We knew from the beginning that we were a temporary business, eventually to be overtaken by the internet.

They built the thing that killed the encyclopedia while openly expecting to be the next one killed. They were right on schedule.

The turnWikipedia does unto Encarta

In January 2001, a free, open, anyone-can-edit encyclopedia went live with no marketing, no salesmen, and no business model to speak of. Wikipedia was, at first, a mess — and then it wasn't, or at least not more of a mess than anything else. What it had was the one thing a disc could never have: it was alive. It updated the day something happened. It never ran out of room. By 2006 the English edition had passed a million articles; Encarta's top-tier Premium edition, painstakingly curated by paid editors, had around 68,000.

Encarta tried to adapt. In 2005 it added a feedback system, a gesture toward letting readers suggest fixes — but nobody was paid, nobody was in charge of a community that didn't exist, and it went nowhere. You cannot bolt "alive" onto something whose whole nature is that it shipped finished, on a disc, in a box, a year ago. By January 2009, of all the traffic going to online encyclopedias, Wikipedia took about 97 percent. Encarta got 1.27.

What happened to itThe disc in the landfill

In March 2009, Microsoft announced it was done. New copies stopped selling that June; the servers and the last updates went dark on October 31. Encarta had lasted sixteen years — roughly one human childhood — which is about how long anyone who loved it got to have it.

It's worth being clear about what died, because it wasn't a bad product. Encarta was good. It was, for millions of kids, the first time research felt like play instead of punishment — the globe you could spin, the pronunciations you could trigger, the castle you weren't supposed to be in. It lost for none of the reasons things are supposed to lose. It lost because it was finite and paid in a world that had just discovered it could be infinite and free, and there is no feature you can add to a disc that beats infinite and free.

So the honest answer to whatever happened to Encarta is the same answer it gave about itself, out loud, in 1993: it was always temporary. It snuck up on the fancy leather set that thought it was permanent, took its place for one turn of the wheel, and then got taken in exactly the same way — not by something better made, but by something you didn't have to pay for and could never fill up. The wheel doesn't care how good the disc was. It only turns. Same as it did to the video store, and the mall, and most of the confident things on this side of the tape.

The castle's still in there somewhere, on a scratched disc in a landfill, waiting for a door to open.