Microsoft BOB

Have you guys ever heard of Microsoft BOB? I doubt so as it was not even officially released to the market. Alrite, what's so special about Microsoft BOB? Hmm... a quick read on the article published in Wikipedia, this is what Microsoft BOB:

Microsoft Bob was a Microsoft software product, released in March 1995, which provided a new, nontechnical interface to desktop computing operations. Despite its ambitious nature, Bob failed to penetrate the market and was one of Microsoft’s more visible product failures. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer named Bob as one project "we [had] undertaken ... where we decided that we have not succeeded and let's stop

Alrite, lets put in Layman's term, Microsoft BOB was actually a software that let's you to have a very special user interface on your desktop. Imagine that you have this study/living room picture on your desktop, where you can see there's picture hanging on the wall, address boos on the table, and etc. Each of it are interactable where it launches applications when you clicked on it. You can also customize the items in there, for example hanging a painting of Mona Lisa on the wall can actually brings you the Adobe Photoshop application when the painting was clicked. When you right click on the painting, it actually allows you to resize the painting in order to fits the room's picture. Sounds cool?


This is your MS Bob'ed desktop.


This is one of the application that comes with Microsoft BOB and it can be launched by clicking on the $ folder which placed on table.


Variety of functions that available in the Financial Guide.

Looking at the history of Microsoft BOB, it was actually developed years ago since Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 era. However due to the negative response that they received from various party, Microsoft BOB was terminated even before Windows 98 released. Although it was terminated, it doesn't really dies. Some of it's member managed to survive and sneaked into Windows XP. Who? If you still remember the yellow dog called "Rover" when you launch Windows XP search page, it was one of the member in Microsoft BOB.


Alrite, I know most of you would ask the next question, where to get a copy of Microsoft BOB? Google would be the best answer, as it was illegal to distribute Microsoft BOB openly. Well it's targetted platform was Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. I've tested it on Windows XP, it works fine without any issue, however it refuse to start in Windows Server 2008,(Longhorn server) due to Microsoft BOB dependency on some 16-Bits component. It was reported fail to runs in Vista too, however some of the people managed to get it runs in Windows Vista (Quick search on Youtube video tells that).

More information and detailed review of Microsoft BOB :
http://www.bentuser.com/article.aspx?ID=327&page=1



Enjoy ;)