BOB WARS WAGING FIGHT FOR FRIENDLY COMPUTER USE FIVE STAR Edition

• Published in: St. Louis post-dispatch
• Main Author: Don Clark The Wall Street Journal
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: St. Louis, Mo Pulitzer, Inc 11.01.1995

Three years later, the software industry's dominant force is heading in that radical direction, largely because of the persistence of [Karen] Fries and her partner on the project. They led the development of Bob, a suite of eight programs for automating household tasks that use animated characters to give instructional tips. The software, identified by a happy face logo with glasses, was introduced last week at the Consumer Electronics show. If so, it won't be because [William] Gates or his lieutenants had the idea. Indeed, Bob is a classic victory of low-level zealots in technology's trenches. Fries, who is 30 years old, faced an exhausting struggle to win resources to develop the program, a diversion from Microsoft's single-minded promotion of its Windows operating system. Fries, whose name is pronounced "freeze," studied business and psychology in college before joining Microsoft seven years ago as a personnel recruiter. But tech talk comes naturally. Fries' two brothers also work in product development at Microsoft; her father is an engineer at Boeing Co., and her mother is a consultant who used to work for Digital Equipment Corp.