Managerial Economics & Organizational Architecture 6th Edition by James Brickley , Clifford Smith ,Jerold Zimmerman

Exercise 13

Microsoft's Encarta is a multimedia encyclopedia on CD-ROM. It has nine different editions. Examples include editions in British English, American, German and Italian. The North American Version alone has 40 million words and 45,000 articles. Microsoft has delegated major editorial decisions to teams of local experts, mostly academics and specialists, "who know their stuff." For example, a team of experts primarily from Italy have been given editorial decisions for the Italian edition. Encyclopedia Britannica uses a different policy. Its central staff has decision rights to assure a standard presentation is presented in all editions. Discuss the pluses and minuses of Microsoft's policy relative to Encyclopedia Britannica's.