Microsoft has announced that they are shutting down MSN Encarta, their multimedia encyclopedia. Encarta has thousands of articles (more than 62,000) including audio video clips, visual and graphics, interactive content, atlas and maps etc. The content was also available on CD ROMs as well as being available online (for a fees)

The Encarta encyclopedia is shutting down on 31st of October (the japan encarta will be shut down on 31st December). As per Microsoft announcement, its not possible to run it in current format (though no official reason was given).

It also seems that it wasn’t possible for encarta to compete against wikipedia which is a free encyclopedia and is thousand times bigger then encarta. Though unlike encarta, wikipedia do not have lot of audio visual or graphics and nice design but it seems for people, it worked and may be this is what people are looking for.

Shutting down of products like encarta and services like google questions do puts interesting questions in front of us about the future of paid services over free services since if there is competition between them and if the quality is same, free service will always win.

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