15 Years of Microsoft Bob 191
harrymcc writes "Microsoft Bob — still synonymous in the tech industry with 'embarrassing flop' — shipped fifteen years ago this week, on March 31st, 1995. When the Windows interface featuring animated cartoon helpers was announced, it was hyped to the heavens and briefly accepted as a breakthrough that showed where software was going. Instead, dismal reviews and poor sales killed it after only a year on the market. At Technologizer, we're marking the anniversary with a complete look at how it came to be and why it failed so resoundingly — and how Microsoft tried again with Office's 'Clippy' and other attempts to revive the basic idea."
If you have Windows XP, you got a copy of Bob (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:it failed because it's bullshit technology (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My Mom Liked Clippy (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the problem with Clippy was that he was ten years too early. If the little fellow was around today he wouldn't get nearly as much abuse. People are more used to the wizard idea now, and to being guided through tasks.
Back then the average user was (I suspect) more technically knowledgeable - the PC as appliance wasn't entrenched. So everybody felt a little insulted when Clippy stuck his nose in their work.
They're still not getting this stuff right. Last week I had to help someone from another department with a mail merge. Office 2007, oh joy. Now there's the usual problems with the wizard not seeing the data source from excel because it doesn't like characters used to name the worksheet or it wants/doesn't want to see a named range, that kind of thing. But the problem here is that the addresses wouldn't line up right in Word. The problem was that Word wanted the address in an invisible text box and it defaulted the address block outside of that box. So I had to go manually cut the address block, then click around on the screen until I highlighted the box, thus revealing it, and paste the block in. I can't even begin to fault my coworker for being stumped on this one. It's the kind of problem she shouldn't be encountering.
I'll go back to the car analogy. Early cars were fussy and demanding. You either had to be a mechanic who enjoyed twiddling with them or hire a mechanic to twiddle it for you. Cars these days have gotten far more reliable. You take it in for maintenance when you're told to and the car won't suffer unexpected failures, they just frickin' work. You don't need to know about timing belts and spark plugs and carburetors vs fuel injection. You just have to have some common sense. Don't drive your car in loose sand. Don't drive through flooded streets. Don't take corners too sharply. People will still make these mistakes but it's not the fault of the car or the engineers.
Software hasn't reached that point yet, not universally. Certainly there have been many improvements across the board. But there are still areas that are, frankly, embarrassing. Microsoft deserves a good portion of the blame simply because they are so huge and influential but they aren't alone.
All you need to know about BOB... (Score:3, Interesting)
Enjoy the licking flames of Hell, Robert.
What happened to Einstein? (Score:2, Interesting)
What happened to the Einstein helper?
I loved that character. It was cute and tried to act intelligent. It was useful, and provided some animated relief humor to amuse my train of thought during long hours of working on Word documents or Excel spreadsheets.
Re:Hey (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking at the screenshots, I think there were some fairly cool ideas in Bob which the industry could learn from. Like many MS products thought I can say "Great ideas! Terrible Implementations!"
I particularly like the way it seems to have been designed to mimic paper-and-pen methods for doing things. Even if the approach was childish and gimicky, it looks like some of the basic UI decisions were in the right direction, if implemented badly.