Microsoft Bob was a Microsoft software product, released in March 1995, which was intended to be a user-friendly interface for Microsoft Windows, replacing the Program Manager . Microsoft held a big advertising campaign and loaded up stores with copies of Bob expecting huge sales. It totally flopped.
A few possible reasons that Bob flopped:
- Bob required a minimum of a 486 with 8 megs of ram, 30 megs of free disk space, and 256 color VGA. Many computers of the day did not meet these minimum requirements.
- It was too "cute" for the average PC users of the day.
- Most people at the time who wanted ease of use would just get a Macintosh.
- Bob was not useful enough to justify its initial sale price of almost $100.
- Windows 95, which was released later that year, had the new Windows Explorer user interface which wiped the floor with Bob.
When BOB starts, you are presented with a welcome screen that is not dissimilar from the Windows XP Welcome Screen:
Rover the dog is almost identical to the various unpopular Office Assistants. Same idea: cute, animated, context-sensitive “agent†to help you work more efficiently. The problem is that Rover, like the Office Assistants, never really do much in the way of assisting – quite the opposite, in fact.
So once you create an account and set a password you will be taken to “your room.†When you create your account you get to choose what kind of room you will add to the house. We chose a “contemporary study.†This is what it looks like:
As you can see, littered around the room are various objects to click on. There are two kinds of objects here: active objects and decorative objects. Active objects do some action – like opening a program, while decorative objects pretty much, well, decorate and that’s about it. Rover gives us a tip of the day: hold the F1 key to display tooltips for active objects, and Shift+F1 to display tooltips for everything, including decorative objects.
Bob included various office suite programs such as a finance application, and a funny word processor. The user interface was designed to be helpful to novice computer users, but many saw its methods of assistance as too cute and involved. Each action, such as creating a new text document, featured the step-by-step tutorials no matter how many times the user had been through the process; some users considered this to be condescending.
Nobody liked BOB and Microsoft cancelled the product. This is pretty rare for Microsoft – even when a new product does very, very poorly, Microsoft typically tries to improve the product. Not so with BOB – it was abandoned. It really is that bad.
