Encarta
Launched: 1993
Innovation: Microsoft's attempt to create a large multimedia encyclopedia, ignoring the arrival of the Internet, which would quickly render it obsolete.
Microsoft Encarta was a multimedia encyclopedia that, in its Spanish version, contained 43,000 articles.
This massive work was distributed on CDs and included full-color photos and even videos.
Following the 1985 release of Groisler's Academic American Encyclopedia on CD-ROM, with only text, and later the 1989 release of Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia, which already included some graphics, Microsoft contacted the world's most renowned encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, but they, having a thriving and profitable business in the paper edition, declined. Microsoft therefore began the non-exclusive purchase of the copyright to the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia, incorporating its contents into its first edition in 1993.
That first edition, from 1994, included 25,000 articles with freely available images and a small collection of videos, as well as up to 8 hours of sound clips. Approximately 40% of the articles were biographies.
Later, in the late 1990s, it acquired Collier's Encyclopedia and the New Merit Scholar's Encyclopedia from Macmillan publishers to expand its content.
With the various versions, more and more multimedia content was incorporated, adding more photos, animations, sounds, maps, and so on, eventually becoming the leading CD-ROM encyclopedia on the market. It lagged behind the British Encyclopedia, which released its CD version in 1994 and eventually closed due to financial difficulties in 1996.
Encarta's database system and search engine were truly powerful.
The Spanish version appeared in 1997 and was somewhat smaller than the English version, with 42,000 articles.
But the emergence of online encyclopedias, and especially the rise of the free Wikipedia, ultimately led to its demise in 2009.
