It could come back with a bit more sophistication, he says

Jul 16, 2013 05:17 GMT  ·  By

Speaking at Microsoft’s Faculty Summit Monday, Bill Gates discussed not only about some of the areas that need to be improved in education, but also about the old-school concept of personal agents introduced by the software giant in 1995.

While Gates admitted that Microsoft Bob was indeed a “premature” piece of software, he did hint that a new application supposed to help users perform their daily activities faster could return at some point.

“You always make mistakes on these things. When the machine tries to do the table with numbers, or the dog comes up and says, ‘Oh, you didn’t do this thing right,’ Microsoft Bob-style. A long time ago we tried a little personality that was definitely premature. I think it will re-emerge, but perhaps with a bit more sophistication. We were just ahead of our time, like most of our mistakes,” he said.

Microsoft Bob was an application launched by the Redmond-based company at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 1995 that provided Windows users with animated cartoon characters specifically created to help perform a number of tasks with the installed software.