In June 1983, the big digital questions descended upon the offices of Encyclopaedia Britannica. The sales promotion department met to consider precisely how much of a threat to its business was the computer. A memo documenting the main discussion points of that meeting was issued to its sales teams (as ammunition against potential customers wanting a digital version), and years later it was published on the website of Robert McHenry, for several years Britannica’s editor-in-chief.
‘One of the questions we are most frequently asked, by both our own people and outsiders, is “When will Britannica be available on a computer?”,’ the memo began. ‘The answer we give is, “Not for a long time”.’
The memo then outlines several reasons for this decision.
None of the popular models of home computer had enough memory to store Britannica. The company calculated how many floppy disks would be required just to store the index, and it came to a vague figure of 100–200.
The option of putting the encyclopaedia on a large mainframe computer and allowing a user to access it via their home computer and a telephone was deemed unwieldy and expensive. It was difficult to find your way around and it was easy to lose your place. On a screen one could read only a few words at a time. ‘A book is a lot easier to use and is more cost effective at this time.’
A computer makes searching fast, but it is not an intelligent way of negotiating an encyclopaedia. The memo gave the example of ‘orange’, which would offer the possibilities of the fruit, the colour, Orange County, or William of Orange. In the print version Britannica indexers had already done that sifting for the reader, eliminating trivial or random references.
‘Until new ways are developed,’ the memo concluded, ‘we can provide a better, easier-to-use encyclopaedia in printed form than in any computerized version. We will not change our delivery method from the printed page to the electronic form until we are sure that it is the most efficient way for our readers to receive it.’
Within a decade, Britannica would be all but overrun by the forward-thinking, distinctly glamorous, multimedia and easily searchable CD-ROMs marketed by Compton’s, Grolier and Microsoft. Tradition – even one stretching back to the eighteenth century – would be afforded little respect as it crashed head-on into a digital future.
VANQUISHED!
If the sport was boxing, the pre-match betting would have evened out nicely. In one corner stood the behemoth, a champion of such towering intellectual prowess and competitive experience that it was surely able to outsmart anyone. And in the other stood the sprightly upstart with fanciful ideas backed by new money. In late 1985, with Britannica’s sales flourishing and Microsoft Windows still at its launch pad, only the foolhardy or visionary would feel secure about the outcome. But then the rules seemed to change mid-fight, and the sport was suddenly being marketed to a new and younger audience watching it on reflective screens, and all the hard-won expertise acquired in the traditional training camp seemed suddenly irrelevant. Rather than fight to the end, as it had done in all its other contests, the hardened behemoth collapsed, tragic in its shocking fall.
A tortuous analogy, admittedly, and quite lacking the redemptive Hollywood ending (it wasn’t Rocky). But it could all have turned out rather differently. In the mid-1980s, a fledgling Microsoft had tried to entice Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. into a digital partnership. The software company knew that a CD-ROM encyclopaedia would encourage people to adopt its Windows operating system, and it tried to persuade Britannica that a partnership would keep it relevant in the twenty-first century – a searchable database of the world’s knowledge available on home computers at a fraction of the cost of the original, with minimal delivery complications and no shelving issues. Britannica said no, partly out of pride, one imagines, and certainly because it feared a diminution of profits. The deal seemed far too one-sided in Microsoft’s favour. Only with hindsight, as the project Microsoft had codenamed ‘Gandalf’ turned into Encarta, does this seem like a calamitous decision.
In 2016, Shane Greenstein, a professor at the Technology Operations and Management Unit at Harvard Business School, published a paper called ‘The Reference Wars’, a forensic account of Britannica’s failure to embrace digital technology. It was really a story of the decline of all standard encyclopaedias, and the old-model notions of how an encyclopaedia should be bought and read. There was an obvious moral too. This was a story of how the personal computer ‘could visit major trauma’ on an old institution, and how no enterprise could afford to consider itself too revered or intellectually superior to take on the challenge.*
Professor Greenstein suggests that Britannica executives were thoroughly aware of the threats of new technology to their business, but were too tied into the old model – the old sales methods, the reliable profits from book sales that had sustained the company for 220 years – to even want to move fast enough in the digital world. ‘In Britannica’s case … even the best outcome in the new market would have been a decline in sales and profitability,’ he notes. ‘As executives begin to manage this uncomfortable situation, the situation goes from bad to worse in the old market. The demand for the old falls at almost the same time that Britannica fails to succeed in the new.’ It was like an addict helplessly acting against their own best interests. ‘When no rational manager could maintain an illusion about the prospects for growth in the old market, management still chose to not favour the new market.’
It was all the more perplexing because Britannica, Inc. had an early toehold in this new world. It had owned Compton’s Encyclopaedia since 1961, and had launched Compton’s MultiMedia Encyclopedia in 1989, the first such product on the market.
The Compton’s operating manual reminds us just how unfamiliar the system must have appeared. ‘To scroll through an article select Play using button 1. Pushing button 1 several times allows you to scroll faster. To page through an article select Play using button 2. Some short articles may be complete in themselves, but in most cases the article will contain one or more cross-references to major articles in Compton’s. These are indicated by Jump icons. To go to a reference select the Jump Arrow.’
But there were also imaginative attempts to make the information (30,000 short articles) enticing. Icons indicated sound and video clips, and links to maps. For some entries, Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart guided users through a Time Machine, a tour through specific historical periods and major events: ‘First, select Enter Machine then select Past (Rewind). Eras are indicated by drawings in the window, with dates above the window. To go toward the future select Future (Play).’
If operating it was clunky, selling it was half-hearted. The Compton’s CD-ROM came bundled ‘for free’ to anyone who bought a full print set of Britannica (at between $1500–$2000), but it was vastly overpriced at $895 when bought on its own. At the beginning of the 1990s, Britannica’s 2000-strong sales force still sold most of their sets through solicited house calls. They had no idea how to use a compact disc, let alone market one. Shane Greenstein quotes a Britannica employee who recalls, ‘I conducted over a year of training with the sales force and taught them step by step how to use the demo on it; they didn’t know how to operate the computers in the potential buyers’ homes.’*