Microsoft Bob

A cartoon house instead of a desktop, sold for one year in 1995

Shut down
19902026

Microsoft Bob was a 1995 Windows shell that replaced the desktop with a cartoon house: click the letter on the desk to write, the calendar on the wall to plan, with animated guides such as Rover the dog offering help. Released on 10 March 1995 at $99 with Melinda French, later Melinda Gates, as its product manager, it sold about 58,000 copies, was overtaken by Windows 95 that summer and was discontinued in early 1996. It is remembered as one of the great flops, and its guides returned as Clippy.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 1995
  2. 7 January 1995 Feature
    Bob is unveiled at CES

    Bill Gates shows a cartoon house with a talking dog.

  3. 10 March 1995 Launch
    Microsoft Bob ships

    $99, needs 8 MB of memory and a 486, which most homes do not have.

  4. 24 August 1995 Decline
    Windows 95 launches

    The Start button solves the problem Bob was built for.

  5. 1996
  6. 1996 Shutdown
    Bob is discontinued

    About 58,000 copies sold. No second version.

  7. 1997
  8. 1997 other
    Clippy

    The Office Assistant brings the guide idea back, to a similar reception.

  9. 2020
  10. 25 November 2020 other
    The XP secret is confirmed

    Bob had shipped, encrypted, as filler on Windows XP CDs.

The site through time

Browse microsoft.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

1995 1996 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Microsoft 1995–1996 Founded Developed by Microsoft; product manager Melinda French

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Bob sold about 58,000 copies against Microsoft's hopes of millions. It needed a powerful PC for the time, treated adults like children, and Windows 95, released five months after it, made its simplified shell redundant. Microsoft discontinued it in early 1996 without a second version.

Our analysis: Bob was built on a real insight, that most people in 1995 found Program Manager baffling, and answered it with a cartoon living room and a talking dog that made them feel patronised instead. It became the standard example of a software flop, which is unfair in one respect: the ideas, guides that watch what you do and offer help, came straight back as Clippy two years later, and were disliked for the same reasons.

History [edit]

The house

Microsoft Bob shipped on 10 March 1995 for $99. Instead of Windows 3.1's Program Manager, users saw a cartoon house. Rooms held objects, and the objects were programs: a letter-writer on the desk, a chequebook, a calendar, an address book, an email program, a quiz game, a household manager. A guide, by default a dog named Rover, sat in the corner and offered advice in speech bubbles, and there was a range of others, from a rat called Scuzz to a coffee cup, each with a personality. You could redecorate the rooms. The name, and the yellow smiley face with Bill Gates-style glasses on the box, was Microsoft trying to be friendly.

The idea came from research at Stanford on how people respond socially to computers, and the product was managed by Melinda French, who married Bill Gates the year before it shipped. Microsoft pitched it at families buying their first PC.

What went wrong

Almost everything, in public and quickly. Bob needed 8 MB of memory and a 486 when most home PCs had less, so it ran slowly on the machines it was meant for. Reviewers found the metaphor cloying and the guides intrusive, and experienced users found no way to do anything they wanted. Then in August 1995 came Windows 95, whose Start button and taskbar solved the actual usability problem in a way that did not involve a cartoon dog. Sales, according to PC Data, came to about 58,000 copies. Microsoft discontinued Bob in early 1996 and never shipped a second version.

The afterlife of a flop

Bob has been on almost every "worst products" list since, and Microsoft joined in on the joke. But its parts lived on. The Office Assistant that arrived in Office 97, Clippy, was the guide idea in a paperclip; Rover reappeared as the search companion in Windows XP. And in 2020 a retired Microsoft engineer confirmed a long-running rumour: the Windows XP installation CDs had had spare space, and to make pirated copies harder to compress Microsoft filled it with an encrypted copy of Bob. Millions of XP discs shipped with the flop hidden inside.

The domain today

microsoft.com carries no trace of Bob apart from a lifecycle entry in its list of obsolete products, and a 2008 TechNet column by Raymond Chen explaining what happened to it.

Similar projects

BlackBerry OS The keyboard that ran the world 1999–2022 Windows Phone The tiles nobody wrote apps for 2010–2019 Palm OS The organiser in your pocket that taught phones to be computers 1996–2009 Symbian Ran most of the world's smartphones, then burned with the platform 1998–2014 Windows Mobile A tiny Windows with a Start button, reset to zero by its own maker 2000–2012 Firefox OS The web as an operating system, aimed at $25 phones 2013–2016

Sources [edit]

  1. The Bob chronicles PCWorld 29 March 2010 [archived]
  2. Bob, your new best friend's personality quirks The New York Times 17 January 1995 [archived]
  3. Windows Confidential: Whatever happened to Bob? Microsoft TechNet Magazine (Raymond Chen) 1 July 2008 [archived]
  4. Retired engineer confesses to role in sliding Microsoft Bob onto millions of XP discs The Register 25 November 2020 [archived]

Last verified: 15 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).