Monday 30 March 2009

Encarta I hardly knew you

encarta®

It came as some surprise when Mary-Jo Foley blogged that Microsoft to close the book on Encarta I had to admit to my own humiliation that despite being a blogger on Microsoft Live and Cloud technology I had no idea what Encarta was. 

Since then I have gone to the Encarta sight and can say its pretty clear MSN had no idea either.  It reminds me of the safe guesses we used to make about emerging technology 20 years ago.  Encarta was not really the victim of the web's success, or MSN failure to think new ideas fast enough, or really a victim at all.  Encarta was always a celebration of organizations ability to deny the obvious reality around them even in the age of Web 2.0.  Its a bit surprising that after WIkipedia and Facebook and dozens of other collaboration tools many, like SharePoint, which were owned and sold by Microsoft that it would still be trying strategy from before the dot com bomb.
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