Encyclopedia A would be funded by Microsoft, the global technology behemoth.
Encyclopedia B would be a not-for-profit initiative and would be funded by nobody in particular.
Content for Encyclopedia A would be generated by paid employees in Microsoft.
Content for Encyclopedia B would be generated by people around the world who would work unpaid and contribute their own time to ensure accuracy.
Encyclopedia A would be sold via DVDs and CDs with lots of great interactive content.
Encyclopedia B would be text based and available for free on the internet.
Now, let’s imagine you asked the economist to peer into the future and ask which encyclopedia would be more successful 15 years down the line?
It would have been a struggle to find even a single economist who would predict the answer to be ‘Encyclopedia B.
Yet, in March 2009, Microsoft announced that it would suspend ‘Encarta’ thanks to Wikipedia winning the war of the encyclopedias.
A Learning a Day 