Microsoft, that's who. But the question I really want to answer today though is:

was Microsoft Bob really that bad? I mean the response I got from people even

after posting one vague tweet showing Bob kind of says it all. It's one of the

most maligned Microsoft products ever and has been the

butt of so many jokes over the years that I don't know if it's deserved or if

it's just an easy target for hyperbole. But I do wonder how many people today

that are saying these things have actually used it. Heck I've never even

used it myself. It was introduced and discontinued so quickly that I don't

even remember seeing it on store shelves. All I knew going into this video was

that Microsoft Bob was introduced in 1995 to serve as a replacement for the

Windows program manager environment, mimicking the layout of a house instead

of the more abstract desktop concept. And I'd always heard it was the origin of

some of the most notorious things in tech including Clippy and Comic Sans.

Quite the legacy if true. And now it's finally time to find out.

Welcome to the Microsoft Bob experience on LGR! First off, big thanks to Jason and

Robert for sending several of the items you'll be seeing in this video. Heh,

I wonder if Robert goes by Bob, that'd be fantastic.

Anyway I ended up with two boxed copies of Microsoft Bob over the years and it

amuses me that each of them have this sticker saying it's a "promotional sample

not for resale." Perhaps it should have stayed that way and never hit retail in

the first place. Still if the box is any indication Microsoft sure was betting on

Bob, calling it "the hard working easygoing software everyone will use."

Even underlined it for good measure. Ballsy. Microsoft were so sure this was

going to be a hit that they planned their own Bob ecosystem with its own

software. Give a nice warm greetings to Great Greetings, the one and only piece

of software released exclusively for use with Microsoft Bob. Man this has to be

one of the single lowest-selling products in Microsoft history, I can't

imagine a more surefire death knell for a program that having Microsoft Bob as

the main requirement. And they even published a book authored

by Barbara Rowley called "At Home With Microsoft Bob: Ideas and Activities For

Getting the Most From Your Home PC." It's a 200-page tome filled with all the

features and potential uses for Bob, even though the box for the program itself

proudly proclaimed the software was so helpful you didn't need a manual at all.

Which was kind of true in a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of way,

because Bob didn't come with a manual inside the box. Instead you got a bunch

of Microsoft-y paperwork like tech support cards and product license

agreements, and even a sheet of Bob stickers. Hmm curiously mine were never

used I wonder what possible reason there

could be for that. You also get, wow, a copy of the premier issue of "Bob

Magazine!" Haha, Microsoft, jumping the gun much? As if there'd ever be a second issue. So

yeah while there is not a proper manual this pseudo magazine serves the same

purpose, letting you know the core features of Bob and how to start

troubleshooting when things inevitably go wrong. Alright well enough of this

stuff let's get Bob installed with Microsoft Windows. And I'm gonna go with

version 3.1 here since that is what it was initially made to work with. And

surprisingly there are no voodoo rituals or weird sacrifices you have to make in

order to get Bob installed. It's just a standard application really, and with a

standard application installation process. You just put in your name and

install away. Once that's done you just open it like

any other application because that's really what it is: a piece of software

you install to Windows that runs like any other piece of software for Windows.

It's just this one is meant to replace Windows in terms of the look and feel.

And you get that straight away with the first screen of Bob here, this red door

to your incoming virtual house. Knock on the door and Rover there will ask you

your name. So yeah the first thing that you do is input all of your information

one by one, like your name, your hometown, birthday, y'know whatever else you want to

put in there. So it will automatically fill that out as you use Bob's

applications. Once that's done Rover will ask you what

you want your default private room to be. It doesn't actually let you see them, you

just kind of choose whichever one sounds the best.

And then the rest of the rooms in the house will become shared rooms that

anyone using Bob can access without a password. But your private room is yours.

After that's done you can waltz on inside and say hello to your brand-new

Microsoft Bob house! It's kind of garish, very yellow, but this is your house. And Rover

then asks you if you want to go on the tour, and if you do you will immediately

start to see the problems with Microsoft Bob sort of boiling to the

surface. And then it really starts with these assistants like Rover. The whole

idea is that they're supposed to make it easier and show you what to do, step by

step, but it just sort of blasts you with a bunch of text and boxes. You just click

"next, next, next" and yeah that's not a very enjoyable interactive tutorial.

What's different from this and a manual? Not a whole lot.

Once the tutorial is over with you can really see what Bob is all about, just by

looking at this first room with all the labels turned on. All sorts of objects

that are laid out here can be clicked on and interacted with to do different

things that Bob has available. For instance there is the Bob Clock ,and this

is an alarm clock. It lets you set alarms, naturally. How intuitive. The whole point

is that you don't have to find the clock application somewhere in your computer,

you can just think "Hey look there's a clock," click on it, it looks like a clock,

it's a clock. That's what the Microsoft Bob philosophy is all about. And not

everything is going to be some interactive application-y kind of

thing, there are plenty of objects in here that are just objects. Like these

flower vases, yeah, I mean you plop those in there and put them anywhere you want.

Move them, resize them, change where they are in terms of layers. It works almost

exactly the same as any contemporary paint, or print, or image manipulation

program. And it doesn't just stop with objects, you can also place completely

different rooms in the house. Inside, outside, attics, kids rooms, kitchens

mouse holes, safe rooms, all sorts of things. Each one of them with four

different design styles and aesthetics. Ya got castle, contemporary, postmodern, and

retro. And functionally every single one of these are identical but if you want

to customize the aesthetic of your Microsoft Bob house you can do that. And you

know what I really like this! And that's now, I certainly would have enjoyed this

back then. As someone who enjoys games like The Sims or pretty much

anything that lets you customize a home or a virtual space -- and even those

architectural programs that were so popular in the 90s -- I enjoy this kind of

stuff. And the fact that Microsoft Bob has so many different objects and rooms

that you can customize, I mean. I know they're all effectively the same and it

doesn't really do anything, but it just gets my imagination going and I like

this kind of thing. And look at all the chairs,

Maxis would approve! And in terms of what the Microsoft Bob competitors were doing

at the time -- and yes there were quite a few of these overlays and user

interfaces for things to make your computer not look like a computer --

Microsoft Bob does it pretty darn well. There's a lot of customization here, not

just the rooms and the objects and all that stuff, but you can even customize

your assistant, each of them with their own personalities and such. Like Blythe

the firefly, Chaos the cat, Hopper the rabbit, Java the lizard thing, Orby the

planet, Rover the rover dog. And yeah that is by the way the same Rover that is in

Windows XP search function. Microsoft held on to some of these guys for a long

time. Anyway you also got Ruby the pirate parrot, Scuzz the rabid rat -- he's pretty

much my favorite one, he's just a sarcastic jerk, not very helpful at all.

He's just like "yeah maybe I'll help you I don't know, give me five bucks." Much

more interesting than Shelly the turtle or Digger the worm. Certainly more so

than the Speaker, it's just a guide that doesn't have any personality at all. And

if you want no guide and kind of defeat half the point of Microsoft Bob then you

can just choose the invisible one and figure things out yourself. But yeah

other than the customization of all this stuff the main point of Microsoft Bob is

that it has a ton of built-in applications. We'll start here with the

Bob Household Manager and this is, well. It's really just a list program. You

choose a category of what kind of list you want to keep track of and it will

set up a bunch of different things for you in terms of whatever you've chosen.

Shopping lists, gift lists, vacation itineraries, personal growth goal lists,

it's all here and they're all pretty much the same. Next up is the Bob

Financial Guide and this one-- oh. It has an error, something's wrong with the

database, can't be opened... Yeah, blue screens of death are not

uncommon with Microsoft Bob, at least in my experience. Maybe the some of this has

to do with the systems I was running it on but yeah. I had to reinstall Bob every

time it happened, the internal database just kept corrupting itself and I had to

go through this process three or four times.

Pretty darn annoying but anyway, once I got it working again yeah, let's get back

to that Bob Financial Guide we were trying to open. And this is uh, well it's

pretty much just another list program. It gives you a bunch of ideas and it fills

in some stuff for you automatically but yeah, you're just typing in lists. Pretty

darn handy for getting out my thoughts regarding what I'm doing with my life

with this video. A much more useful program that it came with was Bob Email.

This not only let you have an @Bob.com email domain, oh my how desirable...

But it was also just a dedicated email product at a time before Microsoft

Outlook was a thing. I mean it *was* a thing, it just wasn't included in Office

yet. Unfortunately it relied on you having an MCI service ID in order to use

it so I can't do anything with it here. But yeah it's an email program and it

worked with all the other Microsoft Bob stuff so that was probably convenient.

Also quite convenient and useful is the Letter Writer for Bob. Are you seeing a

pattern here? This is pretty much all like, dumbed-down Microsoft Office,

Microsoft Works kind of stuff. But yeah anyway, the letter writer wasn't just

about writing letters but it also helps you automate a lot of the process

depending on what you want to do. Especially if you wanted to make a mass

amount of letters or stationery or cards or whatever. You select the type of thing

that you want and the basic content of it and it will fill out a whole lot of

things. In fact it will also give you a massive amount of addresses that it has

built in, for companies and services, and magazines, and politicians and all

sorts of people. So if you wanted to send out a mass letter about "the truth of

Microsoft Bob" in 1994 this was a great way to do it. And when you're done you

can print it out yourself or send it over email. Another program that it comes

with, uh, "program..." is the Microsoft Bob Balloon. It just sort of floats around

and you can pop it. That's a thing. Next up is the Bob Address Book and this is

pretty self-explanatory. You type in your addresses and it works with all of the

other programs in Bob and keeps track of the people that

you know and your contacts and whatnot. So that you can access them directly

through here or you can access them through the other built-in programs like

your letters and such. There's also the Bob Checkbook program and this is one

of those programs that gets rid of your chosen assistant and brings in a

specialist, in this case it's Lexi. Who will then do the exact same thing your

assistant would have done and help you out with writing checks and keeping

track of your finances and all that kind of stuff.

Next up here is the Bob Calendar and yep, it's a calendar. You can keep track of

birthdays and holidays and lunar phases. And set up your itinerary and set some

reminders for different things that you have to do in Microsoft Bob -- or about

Microsoft Bob, what is my life. And then lastly is the one program that is geared

towards the younger Microsoft Bob users. That is: GeoSafari. Yes, Geo-friggin

Safari, a very classic educational quiz game. These were not only those

physical Geo Safari things that you saw in the board game and toy sections back

in the day, but there was also GeoSafari for Bob right here. I'm sure I'll be

talking about other GeoSafari computer games at some point because there were

several but yeah. This one right here is just a very basic quiz program which, as

the name implies, tests your knowledge on geography. The goal here is to figure out

where this picture is located on the map, tell it the correct answer as quickly as

possible, and get the most points as you can. I mean yeah, that's it, it's just

something that you're gonna be probably bored of in two seconds. But you know

whatever, as a kid -- like a really young kid -- I might have enjoyed this. And

finally, you're not limited to the programs that Bob comes with of course.