Posted on Tuesday, March 31 2009 @ 15:39 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Microsoft's Encarta used to be a popular reference, but as the Internet got increasingly popular over the last decade Microsoft's digital encyclopedia lost a lot of ground to freely available reference material on the Internet, like Wikipedia. Therefore the software company
announced today it will discontinue Encarta, the software will be phased out by June and most Encarta websites will go offline on October 31.
"People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past," the software maker said in a notice posted on its MSN website.
Microsoft, which axed 5,000 jobs earlier this year to cut costs and warned profit and revenue would fall over the next two quarters, said it would stop selling Encarta software products by June.
