Before Bob, the failed app of Matteo Renzi’s PD, there was Bob, the bankrupt software of Bill Gates. When in the computer world you want to indicate failure, sometimes you just need to say “like Bob”. Yet it was off to a great start, March 31, 1995 was declared Microsoft Bob Day. It was the day the product was finally on sale. What it was? A kind of personal assistant, an interface that finally had to make it easy for everyone to use the first personal computers (in fact in the screen instead of folders you saw a room with the various things to do while a little dog in the lower right was trying to help you – here a guided tour to Bob).
The launch was done by Bill Gates himself on January 7 at CES in Las Vegas preceded by an impressive marketing campaign: flights to Las Vegas gave passengers Bob’s handkerchiefs; over the convention center flew a plane with a banner welcoming Bob; and on the ground were sandwich-men dressed like Bob. And so as Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and other Hollywood stars cheered from the front row, Gates announced software that would change the world.
The Seattle project had started a few years earlier: the idea was to make it easy for everyone to use a computer. Codenamed “Utopia”, but then he chose Bob. When from research to development, Bob had passed under the control of Melinda French who in 1993 was engaged to Bill Gates, whose wife she will become the following year, which led some to insinuate that without that sentimental involvement Bob would never have seen the light. Bad things.
But it is a fact that when Bill Gates presents it the software is not ready, it takes almost three months to arrive in stores. Three months in which the tech experts of the various newspapers had been able to prove it and found that it was a good idea with a lot of flaws. The only positive review was the authoritative one by Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal which concluded by saying: “As happens with many first things, this too has flaws but goes in the right direction”. What the flaws were is easy to say: for a non-trivial price, $ 99, you took home a software that required high-performance personal computers to work, which excluded the amateurs it was aimed at; Besides, it prided itself on being so simple it didn’t need an instruction booklet, but came with a 210-page tome of advice. Finally, at some point in that year, Microsoft launched Windows 95, which was much simpler than the previous system and which actually solved many of the problems Bob was invented for.
In short, after only a year and less than 60 thousand copies sold, Bob was withdrawn from the market. According to some too soon, but Bill Gates a couple of years later will say: “The software needed powerful computers and there was not enough market”.
Bob has thus continued to live as a meme, a symbol of technological flops. Yet in Siri, Alexa and the other voice assistants, there is something of Bob.