Microsoft spends $5 million to make new encyclopedia designed ‘for the computer’

Electronic references, in particular “multimedia encyclopedias,” have been a big disappointment in the home and educational markets, mostly teaching consumers who have made the plunge that it is still easier, cheaper and smarter to buy the printed version.

To date, these titles fall more under the category of computer novelty item than essential desktop tool. One of the biggest complaints is that electronic references, which are so rich in potential, are produced mainly by software developers more interested in conquering the technological hurdles of interactive CD-ROMs than they are in creating a browsable, attractive, interactive, literate and even accurate reference work.

In fact, it was Microsoft Corp. that got a bad rap early on for its blunders in Microsoft Bookshelf, as the reference was outdated and listed dead people as current heads of state. But the company is trying to do things right this time, and by nearly all accounts, it has succeeded.

FOUR YEARS’ RESEARCH, 18 MONTHS’ DEVELOPMENT TIME

Under the direction of Tom Corddry, the Multimedia Publishing unit of Microsoft’s Consumer Division has spent the past four years researching — and 18 months developing — a new interactive encyclopedia.

The product, named Microsoft Encarta, is an electronic encyclopedia that is “designed and built for the computer,” according to Craig Bartholomew, product group general manager on the Encarta project. It will initially be published on CD-ROM for Multimedia PCs running under Windows 3.1, although Bartholomew says he’d like to see the product on the Macintosh as well. The disc, priced at $395 (about $300 dollars less than Compton’s Multimedia Encyclopedia), is expected to ship in December.

Encarta is stuffed with nifty features, including a 28-volume A–Z encyclopedia as well as a 93-volume thematic encyclopedia, so all the articles on a subject such as “Plants” can be explored quickly. It offers more than 21,000 articles in 93 categories; 100 animations on topics such as physics, biology, human anatomy, history and physical science; 10,150 illustrations, graphs and images; more than seven hours of sound, including world music, foreign languages, and historical speeches and readings; 800 colored maps with voice pronunciation of places and several zoom levels to view details from a global to subnational perspective. The product also includes the Concise Edition of Webster’s Electronic Dictionary and 40,000 entries from Webster’s College Thesaurus.

A linked timeline of history. Encarta also provides an impressive, browsable 20-foot (if you printed the entire thing out, which you can do) historical illustrated timeline from 15 million BC to the present. By clicking on a date or historic event, the user can explore that particular topic area. The timeline itself includes more than 200 original articles.

And if that isn’t enough to keep you coming back for more, the reference, which was written for ages 10 and up, contains an adventure game called Mind Maze, which has four different skill levels and deals with topic areas found within the encyclopedia.

Beyond point and click. Perhaps the most important facet of this reference is that it really provides interactivity beyond the standard point and click of most electronic reference works. You can create customized charts and graphics based on information presented in illustrations used in the reference.

For example, you can create a population growth chart that compares the number of residents in South Carolina during 1990 versus the number of people living in North Carolina at the time. You can then chart the male-to-female ratio in each of the states as well and print it out in a variety of pie or bar graphs.

BEING GOOD ISN’T EASY: THE TITLE THAT ATE REDMOND

The development of Encarta marks a significant change in Microsoft’s title production strategy — the most obvious distinction being the intense amount of human and monetary capital that went into producing it.

According to Bartholomew, Encarta cost “in the ballpark of $5 million,” making it one of the most expensive multimedia titles ever made. (Bob Abel’s Columbus: Encounter, Discovery and Beyond, developed for IBM’s Ultimedia systems, cost $5 million and currently holds that trophy.)

Much of Encarta’s price tag includes expenses for research and development — user interface research and the development of a very sophisticated SQL server database built to track all the media included in Encarta. According to Bartholomew, title development at Microsoft will probably never cost this much again since the R&D completed for Encarta will be used as a foundation for creating future products.

More like a film project. Besides throwing loads of money at Encarta, Microsoft made a fundamental shift in how it produces an interactive CD-ROM title, treating it more like a film project than a computer software program. Ninety-five of the 100 people who worked on the project were creative types, including professional image editors, audio editors, researchers, graphic designers, illustrators and writers. Many of them have since been brought on staff at Microsoft to help with future titles.

Five people were hired solely to handle rights acquisitions for the product, which is chock full of copyrighted images, audio and text. “There is very little public domain photography or audio in Encarta,” says Bartholomew. “We paid top dollar to get the best, and will continue to do so.”

WHAT A CONCEPT: EDUCATE THE CUSTOMER

After acquiring all this different media for the product, the big question became how to protect it from being copied illegally. Microsoft took an interesting approach to the copyright issue, opting to allow consumers the ability to copy all the pieces published in the encyclopedia, with the expectation that each individual user is responsible to abide by the U.S. copyright laws.

To help jog the memories of those foggy on intellectual property issues, Microsoft provides with the product a manual called Research Techniques and Copyright Responsibilities. In addition, the company actually superimposes a portion of the credit line over the bottom of some of the images when they are copied.

How do you skip a generation? In a not-so-modest move, Microsoft has labeled Encarta as a “fifth-generation interface” design for electronic encyclopedias, saying that it skipped right over the fourth generation in development.

“In each of the first three generations [DOS Grolier's, DOS Compton's and Windows Compton's, respectively] text predominates on the screen,” says Bartholomew. “We assumed that [in] the fourth generation text would still predominate, but photos would be embedded in the text, which would enlarge to show larger photos. We found that users wanted more visuals on the screen, and the concept of a book had to be blown apart completely to create a truly ‘multimedia’ encyclopedia. The result of this is the Encarta interface.” (The interface was developed on a Macintosh.)

A REFERENCE WORK THAT BEGS TO BE USED AND RE-USED

Microsoft’s greatest challenge on the Encarta project is still to come. Can the company sell an electronic encyclopedia into the consumer and education markets? Certainly at $395 a pop, it is priced competitively with quality encyclopedia sets in print. In addition, the company is promising yearly upgrades for only $75 to registered users; the first one will even be free.

Not a one-time gig. The company has done its retail marketing homework as well, planning to distribute the product in more than 1,000 stores in America. In addition, the Microsoft team has spent a lot of time showing the product to influential educators and reference librarians, assuring them that this is not a one-time gig, that the company is in the electronic reference business for the long run and wants to hear what these people need in future versions.

Perhaps most importantly, the product itself appears to offer individuals enough reasons to come back to it again and again — just like a real, printed reference work. If this continues to be true as the product moves out of beta, it will be an amazing and noteworthy accomplishment.

THE MARKET IS THE PROBLEM BECAUSE THERE ISN’T ONE

So the problem is not the product, but the market. The problem has always been the market, because there isn’t one. Until computers become as important to consumers — and as inexpensive — as their VCRs, microwaves and television sets, they aren’t going to run out and buy one.

And even if they find Encarta captivating enough to invest in a PC, will they really want to install or even hear about a minimum configuration of a 386SX 16-MHz PC with a sound card, speakers, a CD-ROM drive, a VGA or better video card, and at least 2 megabytes of RAM?

Won’t cede a sale. Having to deal with platforms and cards and system configurations isn’t Microsoft’s fault. It’s the central problem in a cutthroat industry that doesn’t want to cede one single sale by working with its competitors to forge common standards for multimedia computers, players and/or portable devices.

The result is substandard hardware across the board — it’s either too expensive, too hard to use and configure, or it doesn’t do enough. Consumers are obviously having a hard time talking themselves into buying anything that remotely resembles a multimedia “thing.”

Maybe a little consumer research. Perhaps, instead of spending $5 million on a single interactive software title, Microsoft could have teamed up with IBM — or Apple, or Philips, or Sony, or someone — for some serious consumer research before so many millions of dollars were wasted on ill-conceived titles that obviously, to date, no one wants to buy.

Those multimillions might have been better invested in some real, honest-to-god market research to discover what would compel someone to pony up nearly $1,000 for a home computer or new, interactive “consumer device.” At this point, everyone in Multimedia Publishing at Microsoft is probably hoping that reference works a la Encarta — which combines images, sounds, animation and text with a new interface that anyone can use — will do the trick.

Janice Maloney