![]() ![]() That the browser didn't open the door to just streaming something like a book or a magazine, but it was a fundamentally new medium. Then fast forward a few years and the purpose of a browser started to become more obvious. Many companies followed this strategy, creating magazine-like, book-like, browser-like applications that were hard-coded native applications and then distributed via CD-ROM. An application natively hard coded into an executable which was distributed via a more traditional route at the time, a CD-ROM. Encyclopedias were one of the most used books in a library, so why would it not be one of the most used books in what was assumed to be a kind of digital book streaming platform? So instead of making a web page for an Encyclopedia and focusing on a browser, they initially created Encarta. They asked, "What will people use this for"? An obvious use case was that it would be used as a modern form of Encyclopedia. ![]() What I infer Microsoft as having done at the time is, they looked at the growing industry of rich multimedia applications, the internet and the web browser. One of the most well known examples was Microsoft Encarta, which was a project launched and promoted before Microsoft entered the browser wars. In response to this many corporations began media projects that could have existed in a browser, but instead they did them natively and shipped them on CD's. The importance of a browser was simply not obvious for the purpose of displaying what many thought would primarily be a kind of magazine or book viewer. A browser was innately slower and more cumbersome, it innately had major security issues due to its ability to stream content from any source. Of having a window which could stream any image, stream any text, stream any code over the web from any source and render it. In the early 90's as the concept of the internet and the web were proliferating, most corporations at the time did not understand the importance of a browser. ![]() Pretty odd phrase? Let me explain what I mean. The 'Encarta' equivalent of the Metaverse. ![]()
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