Microsoft Bob, released 15 years ago this month, was supposed to layer Windows with an easy-to-use, cartoonish interface for those not so technologically inclined. While perhaps a good idea, Bob turned out to be a notable failure for Microsoft, which shuttered the project by 1996 after nearly a year of terrible reviews and concerns that its hardware requirements exceeded most of its target users’ machines. That’s not the only time a Microsoft product crashed and burned in a very public way. As the following slides demonstrate, some of the company’s other products (Vista, "Clippit," Mobile 6.5) met similar ends—even as others, including Windows 7 and Office, proved to be spectacular successes.
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