A cautionary tale comes with the announced closing of Microsoft Encarta, one of the early CD-based and online encyclopedias: once something becomes free on the Internet, it’s difficult to charge for it later.
While Encarta was Microsoft’s attempt to monopolize yet another industry, Google’s free search engine was the true winner, reports The New York Times:
Encarta could not compete, however, against the Web and Google. The Google search engine is an automated, continuously updated, always-expanding guide to information that is completely free. Authority now comes not from a small group of encyclopedia editors and famous contributors but from Google’s algorithms, which analyze links that point to Web pages elsewhere and other clues to make an educated guess about trustworthiness.
Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s exactly what Google News is doing to the print, radio and TV news industry.
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