BillG was a huge believer in visual computing and digitized personal assistants for the masses in the early 90s. This was before the internet went mainstream, s

BillG was a huge believer in visual computing and digitized personal assistants for the masses in the early 90s. This was before the internet went mainstream, so making a single machine smarter through presentable data repositories seemed the way to get another 100 million computer users. Encarta was a good example of this push. At the time, Microsoft Research, who were an independent org but still well-tuned at coming up with things the mothership’s C-suite enjoyed*, came up with a lot of concepts like the Bob computing environment. Microsoft ended up shipping a lot of these as products largely due to the personal curiosity of a lot of folks, not just Bill. A golden example of several good ideas being combined into one really bad idea. * Ballmer the biggest proponent of going international for growth. There were some neat projects around internationalization, content translation, and regional functionality that didn’t see light as far as I know.