WhereIsAtlas · Software
What Happened to Microsoft Encarta?
Microsoft's CD-ROM encyclopedia sold millions of copies in the 1990s and was switched off in 2009 — not beaten by a rival, but by Wikipedia and the open web.
Encarta put a multimedia encyclopedia on a disc in 1993 and owned the reference market for a decade. Wikipedia and broadband made a yearly CD pointless, and Microsoft announced the end in March 2009. Encarta did not lose to another encyclopedia — it lost to the internet.
A bookshelf on a disc
Encarta began as a straightforward idea: take a printed encyclopedia, put it on a CD-ROM, and let a computer do what paper could not. Released in 1993, it carried thousands of articles drawn largely from Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia, wrapped in an interface built for browsing — photographs, diagrams, animations, audio clips and an interactive world atlas that you could spin and zoom.
It also had a sense of play. MindMaze, a quiz game that sent players through a castle answering questions from the encyclopedia, turned reference material into something children would open voluntarily. That combination of information and entertainment was the whole pitch of the CD-ROM era.
The golden age of the disc
Timing carried Encarta. Through the 1990s a CD-ROM drive went from exotic accessory to standard equipment on a home PC, and families that would never have bought a printed encyclopedia bought a disc instead. Encarta shipped a new edition every year and became the best-selling of the multimedia encyclopedias, ahead of rivals from Britannica and Grolier.
Microsoft pushed it hard, bundling and promoting Encarta with new computers, and expanded the family: the Encarta World English Dictionary, the Encarta Reference Library, a children's edition, and Encarta Africana, a landmark African and African-American reference work. For a while, "look it up on Encarta" was the default answer in millions of homes.
Wikipedia changes everything
The threat came from the network, not from another publisher. Wikipedia launched in 2001, grew at a speed no editorial team could match, and cost nothing to read. Broadband made it fast, search engines made it findable, and the fact that it was uneven and unsourced in places mattered less to users than the fact that it was free, current and effectively infinite.
An encyclopedia on a disc had a fixed size, a fixed publication date and a manufacturing cost. A website had none of those limits. By the late 2000s, the annual Encarta edition was competing with something that updated every minute — and losing the argument about why anyone should pay.
The shutdown
On 30 March 2009, Microsoft announced that Encarta would be discontinued. The Encarta Premium 2009 edition was the last; sales of the software ended and the Encarta websites were shut down. Microsoft folded some of the reference content into its other products and into its search engine Bing, but the encyclopedia as a product was over.
The coverage at the time was blunt about the cause: Encarta was, in the words of more than one headline, a victim of Wikipedia. Britannica, the other famous encyclopedia name, took a different path — it went digital, cut its print edition in 2012 and kept the brand alive. Encarta's owner had search, Windows and Office to worry about, and chose to stop.
What replaced it
What replaced Encarta was not one product but a habit. People stopped treating a reference work as an object they owned and started treating knowledge as something they queried. Search engines answered most everyday questions, Wikipedia answered the long tail, and specialist sites answered the rest.
The disc itself disappeared at the same time. Software stopped shipping on physical media, PCs stopped including optical drives, and the notion of a yearly reference edition became as dated as a phone book. Microsoft's later answer to the same question — an assistant that answers in a sentence rather than an article — is a different product built on the same assumption that Encarta never got to make: that the answer should come from the network.
Where Microsoft Encarta is now
Encarta is gone. The software is unsupported, the websites are closed and there is no modern successor carrying the name. Copies of the discs survive as collectibles, and the occasional enthusiast still mounts a 1990s edition for the nostalgia of the interface and the MindMaze music.
Its real monument is the thing that killed it. Encarta is the clearest example of how completely the open web reorganised knowledge: a product that once defined a category, sold in the millions and was backed by one of the richest companies on earth was retired within a decade of Wikipedia's arrival, because free and infinite beats packaged and finished.
Entries in this story
Sources
- Microsoft Encarta - Wikipedia — Wikipedia (2026-09-15)
- Microsoft closing the book on Encarta — CNET (2026-09-15)
- Victim of Wikipedia: Microsoft to shut down Encarta — The Guardian (2026-09-15)
- Encarta — Britannica (2026-09-15)