Encarta provided MS will a billion-dollars a year of business for a decade. Then it provided traffic to MSN for another 5 years. That is 15 years longer than most of the other encyclopedia vendors.
If nothing else, it would have allowed them the time and money to pivot to a different business model.
The tech world is a red queen's race of constant reinvention.
Looking for a magical business model that will survive unto eternity is, well, magical thinking.
Look to Microsoft and all the times they have reinvented themselves in the past four decades:
- they started as a vendor of programming languages for multiple operating systems for hobbyist computers
- they added a business-focused OS and apps and an entire pbook publishing house
- they long sold one of the most popular and profitable games ever
- then they added content publishing in the CD-ROM era, online access and online-exclusive content production during the internet bubble
- along the way they became the largest corporate server management tools vendor
- more recently they stepped into console gaming and developed a multibillion-dollar a year business in XBOX along with video and music streaming business
- and right now they are in a dogfight with Amazon (another eternally-morphing company) for the top spot in the cloud services business where both are far outpacing all other contenders and preparing for the possible end-of-life-ing of their Windows cash cow.
Look to other tech business and you'll see similar stories; Sony was transistor radios, then it was TVs, now it is console gaming and Spider-man movies. Maybe Ghostbusters.
IBM used to be about tabulator punch cards, then typewriters, then mainframes, then PCs, now it is about corporate consulting and computing services.
Apple used to be about hobbyist computers, then business and educational computers, then about content creation computers, then about digital music, and now they are all about luxury phones and jewelry.
Tech businesses know product lines don't last forever and expecting them to do so lands you on the side of the road as leftover roadkill of the more agile companies. Which is one of the primary reasons why technology disrupts long-established businesses it encroaches on: once a tech-savvy player enters the business they keep looking for new ways to play the same game. And invariably they do.
ebooks are real.
And ebooks aren't just print books minus dead tree pulp; ebooks are a whole new way to package, distribute, and monetize stories. Note I said "monetize"; selling stories isn't the only way to make money in ebooks. Just as selling encyclopedias door-to-door wasn't the only way to make money off reference materials.
Times change and the technology world changes annually, not every five decades.
The biggest publishers are pretty much guaranteed some form of survival into the next century thanks to life+70 copyrights but smaller publishers don't have that luxury; they need to find ways to play the red queen's race of ebooks before they become roadkill like the encyclopedia publishers.
And anything that hampers that is going to have to be fought tooth and nail.