Do you remember Microsoft Bob? If you do, you probably remember it as an intensely marketed but laughable failure – what some call the "number one flop" at Microsoft.
Like A.J., my mom also loved Bob, and mourned when she couldn’t use it any more.
Bob might have been Microsoft’s greatest failure, but Microsoft Plus was their 2nd … oh, wait, I forgot about ME. Silly me.
ARGHHHH!!! All of my failures are in production. None of them were canceled when they should have been.
Bob was pretty bad.
I’ll have to check out Tilt. Sounds interesting.
+1. Indeed. Without doubt, this is one of the best entries on this blog.
btw, MS Bob runs on XP! give it a try 
Reminds me of this quote found in “The Drunkard’s Walk”, attributed to Thomas Watson:
“If you want to succeed, double your failure rate”.
Failure for the Win!
The only truly failed project is the one where you didn’t learn anything along the way.
So true. Once worked on a project that was obviously heading for failure from an early age. I kept pressing that when the project ended there needed to be a post-mortem review, find out why it failed, what could have been done to avoid problems and, what could be learned from the experience. Of course, none of this happened, the project was quietly forgotten about as if it had never existed. I think lessons are not learned if nobody admits when there’s been a problem.
“Success has a thousand parents, failure is an orphan.”
Microsoft’s real genius has always been their willingness to fail. They fail and fail and fail (Windows 1, 2, 3 … Word 1, 2, 3 …) and keep failing until they get something that people buy. Whether you like them or loath them, Microsoft has succeeded by not giving up. I admire that.
I love the quote “Fail faster, succeed sooner”, attributed to David Kelley, founder of IDEO. As long as the mistakes aren’t repeated, failure can be a very efficient way to gain experience quickly - while the timid pick their way thru the minefield afraid of any setbacks, the bold go full steam ahead, learning and adapting from each setback.
You claim “a practical-minded obsession with the possibility and the consequences of failure” is needed for success. I say that leads to inevitable failure, as you are written off as a chronic worrier and general killjoy every time you anticipate a risk and try to do something to overcome it.
In the current mindset of the masses, we are required to be delusionally happy and impossibly confident, right up to the moment of easily avoidable disaster. And then, we are required to be convenient scapegoats because, at some time, we weren’t quite delusionally happy enough and our negativity somehow must have caused the failure. After all, how could a positive mental attitude (ie a refusal to consider possible problems and look for solutions) cause failure?
Our one time assistant provost held a meeting on improving student retention (we’re a private institute, so students = $, and retained students cost a lot less than recruited ones).
Anyhow, she said our goal should be “to ensure our students can’t fail.”
To which I replied, “I see it as essential that our students fail, and our goal is to help them recover and learn from failure.”
I know that in my own professional career (in industry and academia), I’ve learned a hell of a lot more from my failures than I have from my successes. Success may just reinforce your current ways of doing things - and some of these ways are most assuredly poor. Failure makes you reflect, starting from first principles.
A great, thought-provoking entry, but in addition to learning from each project one needs to be able to concisely describe what they learned. Even better if they can write it down, like in an email to themselves. Not only helpful for interviews but also as a periodic reminder.
I also believe it’s important to look at each project and ask what you would’ve done different, especially where you wish you had acted sooner. Holds true for glorious failures and quiet successes.
Without the cancellation of the Arrow NASA would’ve been very different.
You, sir, have a pinball addiction
Make fun all you want, but I’d rather have Bob on my resume than the nameless, faceless stew of middleware, stored procedures, Windows services and batch processes I’ve worked on and promptly forgotten.
It’s good to see that you didn’t give in to the “Bob was just ahead of its time” nonsense that many of the commenters on the blog post to which you linked did. Maybe that’s just considered the polite thing to say when talking to someone that was involved with a failed project, because I have no idea what they can be talking about. Bob was just plain idiotic (selecting a program from a list is difficult and intimidating, but if I put it in a gift-wrapped box on a shelf in a pretend living room then I’ll feel happier when I run it?).
It’s also good to see that, unlike the author of that blog post, you frame it more as good people that got stuck working on Bob rather than Bob somehow spawing all these great people. The only thing I’d take issue with is you somewhat imply that Bob was not a failure for them because they learned something from it. You know what? I doubt it. It’s more likely they got stuck on the team, gritted their teeth while churning out what they knew to be a really stupid piece of software, and thanked their lucky stars when it was finally over. About all they probably learned was to do whatever they could to avoid being put on a dumb project like that in the future.
Chris McCall would rather have Bob on his resume than nameless middleware, etc. It would be a good conversation starter (“ha ha, seriously, you really worked on that thing?”) and so might be a good interview ice-breaker, but it certainly by itself isn’t going to make anyone more apt to hire you.
“…nameless, faceless stew of middleware, stored procedures, windows services, batch processes…”
Is there a shortcut name that describes such projects? Failjects? Soupware? Broodsoft?
The point about the surgeons sounds like an extension of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The best surgeons are aware of how much they still need to learn about surgery while the worst surgeons believe they know it all. I do have to say thanks for pointing out a good way to determine your surgeon’s self-evaluation.