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Encarta Reaches the Decade Mark

Techstination feature for Tuesday, July 15, 2003

The leading electronic encyclopedia reaches the decade mark. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. Encarta... was introduced by Microsoft back in 1993... and has outsold its competition... both electronic and print. The company's strategy has been to offer interim free online updates..and convince users to buy new editions of the software each year. Product manager Karla Tharin says for the just out 2004 versions of Encarta...

"We are actually very, very excited to announce the fact that we are partnering with Discovery Channel. And with the Encarta Reference Library product we have 32 videos for our DVD product and we have 20 videos built into our CD product. We've had the CD and DVD versions of ERL out for a few years now. We also have something brand new that's the visual browser. Visual browser allows people to see the relationships between article content as well as other multimedia such as illustrations and video and audio.

Look up Paris, for instance, and the browser will show you the links to various museums, the arts, politics and culture. Are there bugs in the software? Sure...

"To look at them you'd never know it, but these ants are fungus farmers. The leafcutter ants of South America are the epitome of teamwork."

Encarta Reference Library 2004 sells for about 70 dollars... while the Deluxe Encyclopedia alone sells for under 30 dollars. If you have kids with homework, either version is valuable. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.