I LOVE ANOMALIES -- I'M ALWAYS looking for what's out of whack and trying to understand why -- and the high-technology scene never disappoints me. Here's an anomaly that sticks out like a Mac at PC Expo: We live in an age where information is king and terms such as information superhighway are tossed around along with information at your fingertips and the regrettably unforgettable knowledge worker. How, then, can an information icon such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica be going down the tubes? After all, the Britannica embodies information.
On the surface, you could say it's because this venerable institution exemplifies an old medium floundering in a new age. That may be true, but how many other old-media outlets are dying so quickly? There has to be more to it than that! Besides, there's no new-media substitute for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
It's probably a combination of societal and market variables that's hurting the Britannica. Its marketing is old-fashioned. Door-to-door sales, if you haven't noticed, are frowned upon nowadays. And the old-fashioned sales pitches probably don't help either.
Whatever the reason for its decline, the Encyclopaedia Britannica must move quickly to a new format and model. Suppose you could get something called the Multimedia Encyclopaedia Britannica (MMEB) on an affordable CD-ROM. Would you even consider the competition? I doubt it. The Britannica company has argued that the entire encyclopedia has to fit on one CD-ROM (who knows why that's the thinking?). So it created a text-only CD-ROM that sells for $995. Needless to say, sales haven't been brisk. Obviously the company simply doesn't get the picture.
Now how about this for an idea: Have Apple buy the Britannica operation and maintain it as a resource oriented toward home Mac users. To add value, Apple could make the encyclopedia real-time by turning eWorld into an information server to be used in conjunction with the MMEB CD-ROMs.
Bear in mind that if Apple doesn't do this, Microsoft will. Forbes magazine has been goading Microsoft to buy Britannica for some time now. Microsoft, in case you haven't noticed, has been buying into publishing houses and obtaining the digital rights to all sorts of stuff. Hang out in publishing circles, and you'll hear that Microsoft could be the world's biggest publisher of print and electronic media sometime after the year 2000.
Until now, Microsoft has concentrated its energies on grabbing rights to old material for repurposing on CD-ROM. But how long before Bill Gates sees a gold mine in the backlist at Simon & Schuster or Random House and starts making multibillion-dollar offers? It's reminiscent of Ted Turner buying old movie studios to get at the archives. There's gold in them thar hills. And the gold is now all the more valuable since Congress changed the copyright laws so fewer and fewer products fall into the public domain.
Both Apple and Microsoft are in a good position to make a move for Encyclopaedia Britannica. So are CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online, although their combined infatuation with the Internet lessens the chances of their seeing this opportunity.
Here's how it would work: You sell a ten-disk CD-ROM system called the Multimedia Encyclopaedia Britannica. You can sell it stand-alone or as a complete computer system (an Apple advantage) or with a modem and an account on the Britannica online service (a part of eWorld, Microsoft Network, or whatever). The online service would be an intense information provider designed for basic research and as a children's homework helper. Prodigy has already demonstrated that an online homework helper can be a phenomenal success. For years we've heard predictions that there would be a convergence between CD-ROM technology and the online world. The MMEB could be the fuse to ignite a new market segment and begin that trend.
Of course, the current Britannica management is clueless. For example, it has made its database accessible on the Web via Time-Warner's Pathfinder. Unfortunately, it's a database-query engine -- type in a word or phrase, and Britannica responds. I'm sorry, but database-query engines make for lame encyclopedia interfaces, and this one's no exception. Let's hope that now that the savvy Joe Esposito (formerly of every publishing house known to man) has taken the reins at Britannica, he will immediately ashcan the current $995 CD-ROM, shut down Britannica Online, and sell the whole operation to Apple or some other modern company with new ideas.
If the new home of Britannica were to be Apple, eWorld could really become a place worth visiting. As important, the intellectual tradition embodied in Britannica would live on. Hey Joe: Do it now.
