Quote:
Originally Posted by K. Molen
For starters they could've allowed Microsoft to license their name and information, which may have prevented Encarta from springing up. Then, come the advent of the internet, they could've beaten Wikipedia to the punch by offering up their own encyclopedia online, free of use and supported by advertising.
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Exactly.
And in fact, they were *told* to do so.
Circa 1990, Bill Gates tried to get a non-exclusive limited license to the Britannica texts to do a cdrom encyclopedia to promote Windows 3.x multimedia. He offered to do all the work and give Britannica practically all the revenue; he just wanted the bragging rights for Windows over OS/2 and MacOS.
Britannica said no. They didn't want to alienate the door-to-door salesmen who were their *key* competitive advantage. Anybody could sell encyclopedias to libraries and universities, but only *their* salesforce could guilt middle class families into buying encyclopedias and the endless bounty of the yearbooks!
Which isn't to say Britannica was uniquely stupid.
World Book also turned Gates down.
So did every single encyclopedia vendor not named Funk & Wagnall.
At that point Gates simply bought a data dump, went and hired a recently retired Britannica Editor and proceeded to build his own in-house staff to compie and mantain a new encyclopedia: Encarta.
It took a couple years to get it going, but then in 94 Egghead ran a sale on Encarta and sold out all the quarter's production in a week. At which point MS realized just how much money there was in *cheap* CDROM encyclopedias. Two years later, Britannica was peddling a pale imitation of Encarta that never caught on.
At its peak, Encarta netted hundreds of millions in profits and over its entire life a couple billion.
A lot of that could have gone to Britannnica and helped grease a smooth transition from dead tree pulp to online information service.
It may still end up that way; after somebody else buys the brand and resurrects it.
Which might be Google or Amazon or Facebook.