THIS is the end of the line for Encarta, the encyclopedia that Microsoft introduced in 1993 and still describes boastfully 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 cease and that the Encarta Web site, supported by advertising, would be shut down later this year.

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 arguably 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 conceived pre-Web and had a long gestation. In 1985, Bill Gates envisioned a CD-ROM encyclopedia as a “high-price, high-demand” product with the potential of becoming as profitable to Microsoft as Word or Excel. Microsoft tried unsuccessfully to license rights to Encyclopedia Britannica’s text, then World Book’s. It finally found a willing licensor in Funk & Wagnalls.

Microsoft’s Encarta team concentrated on developing nontext supplements that would make it a multimedia extravaganza. The team developed illustrations and maps, a timeline and an atlas, assembled and wrote captions for 11,000 photographs and digitized eight hours of sound clips.