Monica Harrington’s guest post on Techflash on The lessons of Bob is a great read. Bob has had it’s fair share of critics over the years and it’s now the butt of jokes from ourselves. For those who don’t know the history it’s on Wikipedia.
What’s great about Monica’s post though is the lessons that can be taken from Bob - not just for Microsoft but for anyone with a dream of building and launching software. I especially liked this one
2) Consumers don't care about strategy. Corporate customers do because if they're investing big dollars over many years in a product, they want to know that it will continue to evolve in ways that are beneficial to the organization. In the corporate market, selling a vision is huge. By contrast, selling a vision to consumers is pointless. The key question they want answered is, "Does it make my life better today?" (BTW, I suspect Bob 3.0 had potential to be great.)
So true. Over the last 10 years we’ve built a vast army of people who are great at talking strategy and building enterprise relationships. Consumers, especially Gen Y, couldn’t care less. They just want you to change their life now. And again tomorrow.
You can learn as much by looking backwards as you can by looking forwards.
Trivia: did you notice that Microsoft Bob’s face is the nerd emoticon in Live Messenger?
I wonder how much of the anti-Bob rhetoric is from people who have never actually used the product. I admit to having made MS-Bob jokes without firsthand knowledge. If only there had been a ‘Mojave Experiment’ done with Bob.