My first real job was consulting for Encyclopaedia Brittanica. It was fantastic work, bringing the giant of encyclopedias onto this new platform called the Web.

What most people don’t know is that Britannica was actually a tremendous innovator early in the days of the Web. Harold Kester, a very smart guy, a good friend, and later CTO of Websense, ran the advanced technology group here in San Diego. His team was smart enough to spot the importance of the Web very very early (we’re talking NCSA mosaic days, before Netscape existed), and make fantastic advances, particularly in the field of search. I was lucky enough to work with them.

Unfortunately Britannica’s core business, selling encyclopedias door-to-door, was getting killed by this CD based encyclopedia from Microsoft called Encarta. Who would pay over a thousand dollars for something you could get practically free?

Britannica’s business model didn’t survive the age of the CD, but the company did manage to transform itself and leap to the next technology, the Web.

Then it ran into this thing called Wikipedia.

All of this nostalgia is stirred up on reading that Microsoft has decided to close down the Encarta business. A technology and model that killed a long-running, well established business itself killed by a newer, shiner model.