Microsoft's Megaflop

Software "Bob" tries to be cute, succeeds at being silly

©1995, The Boston Globe

I've been getting to know a new guy on the block named Bob.

Bob, as you may have heard during the public relations blitz of the last three months, is Microsoft's new personal computer program for the home which goes on sale today (March 31, 1995) at computer and software stores everywhere for about $99.

It has been a fundamental tenet of this column that personal computing is for everyone and ought to be easier and more reliable for all of us. I therefore welcome Microsoft's introduction of a program that sets out to make everyday tasks manageable, cutting through the technical jargon and confusing routines that frighten many people away from machines that might make their lives easier.

Unfortunately, Bob is an utter simpleton, poorly designed and dreadfully executed.

If it were being introduced by anyone but the largest software maker in the world with the clout to command attention in any marketplace, you would never hear of this program, and I wouldn't bother to review it. Bob would simply sink into the bog where bad products die quiet, unnoticed deaths.

That is particularly sad because the concept of Bob is not only sound but very much needed. Bob purports to offer families a tool to help them do more easily and efficiently things they already do on paper, such as write letters, pay bills, balance their checkbooks and keep track of addresses, appointments and important dates like birthdays.

By using familiar formats, such as on-screen check registers and checks that look as if they were just plucked from someone's pocket or purse, Bob helps an inexperienced user adapt to what might otherwise seem an unfriendly electronic environment.

Of course, many computer programs are getting easier to use. Bob seeks to go further by making a person's initial encounter with the machine a pleasant experience, presenting the work area as a ``home'' instead of a collection of indecipherable icons that newcomers to Microsoft Windows often find forbidding. Pointing to various symbols scattered around a room and clicking the mouse enables the user to rearrange the picture on the screen or call up the functional parts of the program.

Some people may find it terribly cute.

A cartoonish dog of uncertain parentage _ or any one of several similarly silly ``guides'' _ welcome the user with audible barks, squawks or painfully clever comments that are supposed to make you feel comfortable and friendly toward the machine. Microsoft describes the environment it is seeking to create as a ``social interface,'' an essentially meaningless bit of new jargon that deserves to die with Bob.

Most of the effort that went into developing Bob clearly was concentrated on that interface, rather than in making the functional programs useful. The software hasn't even been properly debugged.

My first effort at printing a letter, a simple document with the word ``fax'' in large type on the first line and a paragraph of normal text below it, produced a pageful of garble, although it looked fine on the screen and all the settings I could check were normal.

Other sections of the program, such as the Household Manager and Financial Guide, consist largely of text dumped from books onto the hard disk, where they are more difficult to read and haven't even had the benefit of a good proofreader. Where text didn't fit in the Bob format, it simply got dropped altogether, even in mid-phrase.

I asked my teenager to give Bob a go, and he spent an hour decorating his electronic ``room'' without ever doing a lick of work. That's okay for starters, but it becomes boring after a while, and Bob makes getting any job done using a computer more cumbersome than necessary.

As one example of the program's inefficiency, try changing your personal password from inside the program (Each user has a password to enable several members of the same family to keep their work separate and protect it from the prying eyes of others in the household.)

First, click on ``Other options,'' then ``Change something,'' then ``Change your password and information,'' then ``Change your password.'' At that point, the dog reports, ``I can't do that here,'' and instructs you to leave the program, go back to the front door of the home and try from there. It takes 17 steps.

My notebook is full of examples of Bob's failure to find the easy or best way to accomplish simple tasks or to think through the project at hand.

For some reason, Bob wants to know your time zone when you're getting started and checks Pacific as if everyone lived with Bob in Redmond, Wash. One would think that somewhere in the 33 million bytes of program code Bob takes up on a hard disk, there would be a little routine that could guess the time zone from the ZIP code information Bob gathered earlier.

Loading the various elements of the program is agonizingly slow, and jumping from one part of Bob to another is impossible without quitting one project and cranking up another. Having a one-track mind doesn't make jobs easier, but they certainly do take longer.

Bob boasts that the program doesn't come with a manual or traditional help file because the electronic assistant is always there to act as a guide. When I wanted to copy a letter I had written, however, clicking on Rover for help made him scratch himself and roll over. Cute, perhaps, but hardly the kind of assistance I needed.

Letter Writer, Bob's basic word processor, is of limited value to students in the house because it can't do footnotes, and just to show it's dumber than DOS, it doesn't do envelopes, either. Perhaps the program's developers don't expect anyone in the house to do any serious school work _ or mail anything, for that matter.

There is an electronic mail service available to Bob users whose computers are equipped with modems and connected to telephone lines. It costs $5 a month for up to 15 brief messages and 45 cents for page-length messages after that. If you're wondering whether that's reasonabe, America Online offers unlimited e-mail and up to five hours of news, reference, discussion groups and on-line chatter for $10 a month. And it's easy, too.

Most offensive of all is Bob's failure to let users grow as their knowledge and needs increase. If we've learned anything about personal computing, it is that people who buy machines for one purpose almost inevitably find they want to do more with them as they become more adept.

Documents written in Bob, however, can't be read by more advanced word processing programs, not even those produced by Microsoft, such as Works or Word. There is simply no room for that sort of narrow mindedness in today's computer world, where the free exchange of data is becoming an imperative.

Bob, I'm sad to say, is more a prison than a home.

-- The Boston Globe, March 31, 1995