Britannica's door-to-door sales force was undone by a CD-ROM — then the internet

For more than two centuries, Encyclopædia Britannica was the gold standard of reference, and for decades its business was built on a famous door-to-door sales force that sold expensive multi-volume sets to families. The sales force was the engine of the company, and the printed encyclopedia was a fixture of the middle-class home.

Then two disruptions arrived. First, in 1993, Microsoft launched Encarta, a multimedia encyclopedia on a CD-ROM that was cheap, convenient and good enough — and it gutted the market for expensive printed sets. Britannica's door-to-door sales collapsed, and the company disbanded its famous sales force in 1996. Then came the internet, and eventually Wikipedia, which offered a free, constantly updated encyclopedia online.

Britannica survived by moving online, but the print business that had defined it was gone. In March 2012, after 244 years, Encyclopædia Britannica announced it would stop publishing its printed edition altogether. The company that had sold knowledge door to door for generations had been undone first by a CD-ROM and then by the internet — a cautionary tale about how a dominant sales model and a beloved product can be destroyed when the medium of delivery changes.