| HAPPY : SMILE as friendly : milk angry : lawnmower sad : frown loving : elevator | David : Goliath and Wikipedia : Encarta and Wii : Flight Sim as Zoho : Word ?? |
Microsoft announced they are killing the Encarta CD-based multimedia encyclopedia. Encarta was a great product, it was updated, comprehensive, accurate, and reasonably priced. It couldn't compete with Wikipedia - which is updated, comprehensive, less accurate, and free.
Encarta was a powerful thing in its day (1993). For a lot of people, it was their first multimedia experience. I remember showing people how it could play video of President Kennedy's inauguration speech (Windows 3.1, if I remember right). It was made possible by the capability of the new CD-ROM media, and it was a reason to get a CD player for your computer. It was one of the first products that really established the home PC as a legitimate educational tool. Encarta was one the best things going before the Web and Google arrived. There's no joy at this demise.
What does interest me is that it's a sign that progress continues. Encarta killed the printed home encyclopedia and put a serious crimp in that industry. I remember when I was a kid, my parents invested in an encyclopedia for the house, and it was a big deal. Years later, Wikipedia kills Encarta using the same type of creative destruction through disruptive technology.
This doesn't happen in a vacuum. Microsoft has also recently announced it's killing off its Flight Simulator product, arguably one of their longest running games (released in 1982). I liked Flight Sim, it was (and remains) pretty cool. There's nothing wrong with the software; Microsoft has lost the niche to the better gaming platforms that are out there with more advanced interfaces (hello, Wii). I may actually go out and by the most recent version of FlightSim before it goes away.I wonder if someday we'll be sitting around, drinking Chateau de Chateau and talking trash about how hard it was in the old days when you had to use Microsoft Word to generate documents. That damned paper clip!
Recently, the primary competitor for Word has been Google Docs, which is a free web-based word processing program. It works in your browser; it doesn't care what operating system (Windows 98, Mac OS X) you're using. You can store your documents on Google's server cloud. Don't want to spend $400 on Microsoft Office? Google offers a free compatible alternative for every Office product. Google Docs isn't as feature-rich as Word, and you need to be on the web to use it.
This week's NY Times article talks about Zoho Writer, a free browser-based word processor that you can use in the cloud and offline. Zoho is more feature-rich that Google Docs, it works both online and offline, and there's no advertising. The rationale for buying Word just got a little bit shakier.
Microsoft estimates that 500 million copies of Office are running on the world’s one billion Windows machines. Just like they'll never close down the steel mills, and we'll never be friends with the Axis, I'm sure somebody at Microsoft is Somebody from WordPerfect will find the irony in this.
(EDIT 12:29 EDT ) Seems like this is getting a lot of hits out of New Delhi. That's pretty cool. Hello!
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