In 1995, the world's dominant technology company debuted a new, forward-looking interface that would predict, in many ways, how humans all over the world would interact with computers in the decades to come.
Its name was Bob, the company was Microsoft, and the gimmick was presenting a PC as a cartoonish house overrun by anthropomorphized animals and pestering office supplies. For those of us who still remember it, Bob is synonymous with embarrassing failure. The initiative was roasted in the press, sold about as many copies as a reasonably popular indie album, and was immediately subsumed by the Windows 95 operating system. Its legacies were the most hated font and virtual assistant to ever grace a screen.
And yet, despite its disastrous execution, it turned out Bob was onto something. Tone down the cloying, saccharine, Hanna-Barbera atmosphere, and Bob's visual metaphors and "social interface" today are all but running the world, in the forms of iOS, Alexa, and Siri. Let's reintroduce ourselves.
 Microsoft BobFebruary 20, 2019 |
What about him?
In 1995, the world's dominant technology company debuted a new, forward-looking interface that would predict, in many ways, how humans all over the world would interact with computers in the decades to come.
Its name was Bob, the company was Microsoft, and the gimmick was presenting a PC as a cartoonish house overrun by anthropomorphized animals and pestering office supplies. For those of us who still remember it, Bob is synonymous with embarrassing failure. The initiative was roasted in the press, sold about as many copies as a reasonably popular indie album, and was immediately subsumed by the Windows 95 operating system. Its legacies were the most hated font and virtual assistant to ever grace a screen.
And yet, despite its disastrous execution, it turned out Bob was onto something. Tone down the cloying, saccharine, Hanna-Barbera atmosphere, and Bob's visual metaphors and "social interface" today are all but running the world, in the forms of iOS, Alexa, and Siri. Let's reintroduce ourselves.
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58,000: Copies of Bob sold
$99: Cost of Bob
$4.95: Monthly cost of Bob's email service
15: Emails included in the monthly cost
$0.15-$0.30: Cost of additional emails
8 megabytes: Random-access memory required to run Bob
$800: Cost of 8 MB of RAM circa 1995
12: Number of animated guides in Bob
15%: Share of Americans with internet access in 1995
42%: Share of Americans who hadn't heard of the internet in 1995
Bob is born
Nineties kids will remember that Microsoft was incredibly dominant—so much so the US Department of Justice sued it an antitrust case—and its machines were intimidatingly complex for average users. Especially compared to Apple's offerings, its juggernaut operating system, Windows 3.1, was like a grocery store or restaurant menu—well-organized but overwhelming, as one Microsoft vet explains. (Consider that fewer than a quarter of Americans had home computers in 1993, the year after 3.1 debuted.)
Early in the decade, inspired by user-experience research, Microsoft tried to build a new, n00b-friendly interface. Instead of "windows", it built on the even more obvious metaphor of "rooms." Instead of abstract icons, rooms contained contained explicit signifiers for basic home-office programs. A cast of animated characters with different personalities—Orby the "worldly, loveable, carefree" globe, Scuzz the "stupid, rabid" rat, and more—walked users through the applications.
But almost everything went wrong. Bob was expensive; it would only run on fairly powerful computers; it was so Saturday-morning-show that it felt like an embarrassing crutch. Worse, it integrated badly with Windows 3.1. If a user needed something outside of Bob's interface, it dumped them into the operating system with no clear way of getting back. Some features were unexplained altogether. What users wanted was an interface that was sophisticated yet simple, navigable by a child yet adult in aesthetic, and seamless. Bob got all that wrong (and more), yet in some ways predicted our modern-day tech landscape.
"Bobs are familiar, Bobs are common. Everybody knows a Bob. Therefore, a product named Bob is easy for everyone to identify with and use."
Pop quiz What infamous font was developed for Bob? |
Know your skeuomorphs
A skeuomorph, according to Oxford, is "an object or feature which imitates the design of a similar artefact made from another material." The fake seams on a child's rubber baseball are skeuomorphs. Wood-grain paneling is one too. On computer screens, a skeuomorph is a virtual design that indicates the purpose of an app or function—the trash can or recycling bin on your desktop, or the lined "pages" on a notepad app.
Bob was radically, aggressively skeuomorphic. The user knocked on a door and entered a cozy living room. Clicking on a letter on a table opened the letter writer; clicking on a checkbook, a personal-finance organizer; on a rolodex, the address book; and so on.
This was novel, well-researched, and one of Bob's many disasters. "The problem with radically new things is the first ones are usually atrocious," Clifford Nass, a Stanford computer-interface expert who worked on Bob, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1999. But Nass also noted that, even then, "many things are showing up that came from Bob."
When Apple debuted the iPhone, it relied heavily on skeuomorphs like ruled yellow paper for its notepad, a binding for its address book, and a camera shutter animation, as a way of easing users into a radically new computing medium. When users figured it out, things got more "minimal and utilitarian," or in design-speak, flatter. Ironically, Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system, with its ultra-flat Metro user interface, arguably failed by going too far in the other direction.
Have a friend who would enjoy our Obsession with Microsoft Bob?
Hi, Bob
Besides the colorful house and happy skeuomorphs, Bob's designers created a cast of cartoon characters to hold your hand through the computing experience. The infamous Clippy, a later character built on the Bob foundation, is probably the only one non-Bob users will never forget (Rover, a dog with uncannily large eyes, returned for Windows XP). For years, the anthropomorphized paper clip popped up in Microsoft Word to lend his unwanted assistance with basic tasks long after the user mastered them.
Microsoft employee Chris Pratley described Bob as "optimized for first use": his help was great for the first hour or so you used the program—which made him look great in user-experience testing—then unnecessary, then infuriating. "The 47th time, it's at best passive-aggressive behavior, and at worst it's downright hostile," Nass said. "We know what we do with people like that. We hate them." (Later Nass cooked up an evil-twin scapegoat version of Clippy that did well in tests.)
But Bob's "social interface" was also a peek into the future. The germ of the idea was that being walked through an unfamiliar medium by a human-like computer assistant was a way to ease users into the experience, and it would show up later with assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa.
As Brian Feldman notes in New York magazine, Gates understood this at the time, even if the technology was not even great at powering Bob, much less voice assistants: "We are just at the beginning of social interface," Gates said in 1995. "The whole way you interact with the machine will be different, you'll be able to talk to the machine, and it will use voice recognition, or so-called natural-language processing, to be able to understand what you do." Bob's assistants were a little too basic—socially and technologically—but the idea of a friendly computer voice making cutesy jokes was prescient.
Clippy wasn't just hated because of his unwanted condescension. Microsoft ran focus groups on him and the other Microsoft assistants; here's how a former exec describes the results: "We did a bunch of focus-group testing, and the results came back kind of negative. Most of the women thought the characters were too male and that they were leering at them. So we're sitting in a conference room. There's me and I think, like, eleven or twelve guys, and we're going through the results, and they said, 'I don't see it. I just don't know what they're talking about.'"
A brief introduction
One reason Bob is considered such a failure is that the program fell disastrously short of the hype. But according to Monica Harrington, who did communications for Microsoft at the time (and whose husband was a lead Bob developer) the hype was at least efficient. Working with a small budget, she used cost-effective moves like advertising on the airplane napkins on flights to that year's Consumer Electronics Show. This made Bob—which has a rep for an expensive rollout—seem like it had more marketing money behind it than it actually did.
Daniel Rose's Legacy Computer Collections has a lovingly thorough tour of Bob.
Quiz Do you know Bob? |
In yesterday's poll about Chicken Soup for the Soul, 67% of you said it's a bit too corny.
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Today's email was written by Whet Moser, edited by Jessanne Collins, and produced by Luiz Romero.
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