2008/6/9 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
Encarta is not the main Microsoft's business, so some secondary reasons may be crucial in their decision to go or not to go to the free knowledge. And because of that I didn't think about them.
In Encarta's case - Live Search used to cover stuff in Encarta links. Now they notably favour Wikipedia. I'm wondering if there's room for an arrangement of the sort that entails us getting money. Windows is a supported platform for MediaWiki after all :-)
But, for Britannica this is a very important question. At the era of Internet [and Wikipedia] the most of people are not willing to spend more money on their books or CDs or DVDs. So, they need to find some other business model. Which means that they may to try to copy free software based business model of big corporations, like IBM is. And we are the free knowledge partner.
It's a pity they've been so antagonistic to Wikipedia in the past few years, as if that would have helped them. I think the success of Wikipedia is that it fills a niche that was basically unfilled before. I can't believe that any significant number of the people making wikipedia.org the #8 website in the world have opened a paper encyclopedia since they were at school. I'm happy for those people to look at Britannica, Citizendium or whatever from looking at Wikipedia - it spreads the idea that people can do active research for information beyond just entering a term into a search engine.
- d.