星火英语四级模拟题 快速阅读 百科全书知识的过去与现在.doc

题材：商业经济 字数：930　 　建议做题时间：15分钟 Encyclopedic Knowledge, Then vs. Now 百科全书知识的过去与现在 This is the end of the line for Encarta, the encyclopedia（百科全书） that Microsoft introduced in 1993 and still describes on its Web site as “the No. 1 best-selling encyclopedia software brand for the past eight years.” Microsoft recently announced that sales would soon stop and that the Encarta Web site, supported by advertising, would be shut down later this year. Microsoft says sales of Encarta, its encyclopedia, will soon stop. It’s hard to look at the end of the Encarta experiment without the free and much larger Wikipedia springing immediately to mind. But Encarta would have failed even without that competition. The Google-indexed Web forms a virtual encyclopedia that Encarta never had a chance of competing against. Encarta was considered pre-Web and had a long decision-making process. In 1985, Bill Gates pictured a CD-ROM encyclopedia as a “high-price, high-demand” product with the ability of becoming as profitable to Microsoft as Word or Excel. Microsoft tried unsuccessfully to get permission rights to Encyclopedia Britannica’s text, then World Book’s. It finally found a willing one in Funk Wagnalls. Microsoft’s Encarta team concentrated on developing non-text addition that would make it a multimedia show. The team developed illustrations and maps, an occasion and a map collection, put together and wrote description for 11,000 photographs and digitized eight hours of sound parts. Early in the project’s history, a focus group of future customers was asked together, and people said they would happily pay $1,000 to $2,000 for a multimedia encyclopedia on CD-ROM. But at the time, no one foresaw the collapse of prices in the information economy. When Encarta was finally ready, Microsoft set its price at $395, the same price as other CD-ROM encyclopedias that had beaten it to the market. Encarta sold poorly, gaining only 3 percent of the market six months after i