
Microsoft Bob - gscott
http://toastytech.com/guis/bob.html
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mchahn
One of the first things I looked up in XP was how to turn the dog off in
search.

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nikolay
It was cool. Not sure why it was ridiculed so much. Microsoft hatred by
default, I guess.

~~~
Retra
It was ridiculed because it _wasn 't_ cool. Microsoft made lots of things that
people wanted to use. Nobody wants to spend $100 on some software without some
clear benefit from it, and almost nobody who knows what their software needs
are needs a product like this.

That confines this product to the aisle of "things you would never buy for
yourself."

It's a classic UI dilemma: how do you simplify an interface without removing
the functionality that makes the product powerful? However you'd answer that,
what you don't do is bury that functionality behind a bunch of obscure
analogies that have nothing to do with how that functionality works. The
presence of a couch on that screen does nothing to help the user do anything
that they need a computer to do, for example.

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sliekasbekelniu
It reminds me Silicon Valley (S03E09) when they introduced "Pipy (or Piedpy?)"
to help the user through their UI which user is too dumb to use..

