Microsoft Bob. The Graphical Interface that Wasn’t : Elitist Snob: Mac snobbery and such

Microsoft Bob. The Graphical Interface that Wasn’t

Posted on December 4th, 2007

Posted by Kent Pribbernow

Bob, for those of you who don’t know, was Microsoft’s misguided effort to develop a friendly graphical interface for common consumers, back in the mid-1990s. Apparently Microsoft believed that home users were too either stupid to use a computer or lacked the aptitude and adaptive learning to ever use one. The solution they came up with was to turn Window’s desktop shell into a hideous task-based cartoon environment, complete with animated characters. The idea never took off, fortunately, but from Bob’s ashes rose an even more dreaded figure that would make it’s way into MS Office; the infamous “Clippy” office assistant.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Humor, Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

5 Responses to “Microsoft Bob. The Graphical Interface that Wasn’t”

What the hell? Thank GOD they never commercialised that, it’s hideous!

largopredator
December 12th, 2007
Hi, nice design on the blog!

The funny thing is that Microsoft where serious about this. Wonder if anybody at Microsoft actually tested Bob, probably not.

Igor Jovic
December 18th, 2007
Wow – that’s quite hilarious. I wonder how the PC world would look like if that would have been introduced and sold all over the globe. Thrilling:)

Robert
December 20th, 2007
Hey, put some updates please! Very busy huh… I’m your regular visitor anyway… Looking forward to see some updates soon… Cheers.

Fath
January 12th, 2008
YouTubeRobot.com today announces YouTube Robot 2.0, a tool that enables you to download video from YouTube.com onto your PC, convert it to various formats to watch it when you are on the road on mobile devices like mobile phone, iPod, iPhone, Pocket PC, PSP, or Zune.

YouTube Robot allows you to search for videos using keywords or browse video by category, author, channel, language, tags, etc. When you find something noteworthy, you can preview the video right in YouTube Robot and then download it onto the hard disk drive. The speed, at which you will be downloading, is very high: up to 5 times faster than other software when you download a single file and up to 4 times faster when you download multiple files at a time.

Manual download is not the only option with YouTube Robot. You may as well schedule the download and conversion tasks to be executed automatically, even when you are not around. Downloading is followed by conversion to the format of your choice and uploading videos to a mobile device (if needed). For example, you can plug in iPod, select the video, go to bed, and when you wake up next morning, your iPod will be ready to play new YouTube videos.

Product page: 3w.youtuberobot.com
Direct download link: 3w.youtuberobot.com/download/utuberobot.exe
Company web-site: 3w.youtuberobot.com

steveking
May 15th, 2008

Who is this guy?

Kent.Pribbernow
- noun
Definition: a freelance web designer. senior web designer for Sweetwater Sound. a tech writer for lots of online publications. To learn more about me, go here.

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