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The Death of Clippy

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the annoying-desktop-mascots dept.

AppScout interviews Office's Group Program Manager, Jensen Harris on the subject of Office 2007. Harris reveals that Clippy, the bane of all semi-sentient Office users everywhere, is officially dead. The decision apparently revolved not around the passionate hatred for the unfortunate sprite, but simply out of a desire for UI coherency.

7 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Clippy did its job... Unfortunatly. by evilbessie · · Score: 3, Informative

    "they don't need to advertise all *their* features all the time"...

  2. Re:Goodnight sweet prince by TCM · · Score: 4, Informative

    Beware, though. He might just come back.

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    Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
  3. Clippit by Known+Nutter · · Score: 2, Informative

    His name is (was?) actually Clippit, as someone above indicated, not Clippy. While I understand Clippy was his nickname, he's dead now and his proper name should at least be mentioned.

    --
    Beware of the Leopard.
  4. The original clippy was good by ericlondaits · · Score: 4, Informative

    When one of the developers/researchers working in MSN Search came to my university to give a one week course on probability based models for search applications he told us that originally Clippy was meant to run with a quite advanced AI (based on a probability model), but was changed before shipping for the much more simpler version we all knew. I'm not sure but I think it was to decrease CPU utilization.

    The mostly crappy AI made it extra annoying, the rest is history.

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    As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
  5. You have died (2nd time!) by Captain+Spam · · Score: 2, Informative

    Funny, I thought I heard this before. Like, around the time XP was coming out. And how Microsoft hired Gilbert Gottfried to voice the lousy chunk of wire to advertise how Clippy was dead and gone with Office XP.

    Give it another six years when Windows Vienna comes out (given how much a success Vista is). We'll be able to relive this story all over again!

    --
    Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
  6. fully sentient users, too by dltaylor · · Score: 2, Informative

    "Clippy, the bane of all semi-sentient Office users "

    Sentient, and semi-sentient, Office users were not the target audience of Clippy, unless it was always intended as annoyance, leaving ...?

    Now that OpenOffice is usable enough, for me, I have stopped editing RTF in emacs. At one job, I was asked to explain to a co-worker how to create PDFs. I started with "go to this address

    http://www.openoffice.org/

    download and install OpenOffice, then call me to come over".

  7. i thought clippy had already died by nih · · Score: 2, Informative

    the proof is here

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    I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life :(