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The Death of Clippy
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.
Personally, I think clippy represents what is wrong with office more than anything else. For most users Office is far too complicated, and has far too much functionality, so it "needed" a way to inform average users how to use some of the features.
Personally, I see three classes of Office users and there seems to be a reasonable argument that there should be three seperate classes of Word/Office for these people; the classes are students/home use who want something which they can write a paper or resume on, office workers who want a little more control over their presentation, and professionals who want complete control over their presentation.
"The decision apparently revolved not around the passionate hatred for the unfortunate sprite, but simply out of a desire for UI coherency"
Translation:
We got rid of it for our own internal reasons, and not out of any desire to give users what they want - in adherence to our standard business practices.
influential or at least not as feared by MS leadership. The REAL reason clippy was inflicted on us was because he was (as another slashdot poster mentioned) the "last piece of MS Bob technology." The project manager for MS Bob is now better known as Mrs Bill Gates.
Unfortunately, they overhauled the UI in a way that IMHO completely fsailed to help people find the functionality. The previous UI, with menus and toolbars, for me was a model of a tidy workshop, with most tools tidied away in logical places (the menus), and just the tools one uses a lot or are using just at the moment left out (on the toolbars).
The Office 2007 model, on the other hand, for me is a model of tipping out the contents of every draw and box in the workshop into a heap in the middle of the workshop floor (the ribbon) and having to search through it every time you want something. There doesn't seem to be any useful way of configuring it to particular styles of use, so whenever I wanted anything from the ribbon I was confronted with a huge block of the screen on my laptop taken up with options that I had set up once and for all in the template.
I could go into a lot of other things that I think are wrong with the Office 2007 UI (I tried the beta for two months, and I reckon by the end of that time it was still dropping my productivity by 20%-30%) but that's the main one that I think is related to the death of Clippy. Unfortulately, I think Clippy is needed more than ever, but needs to be equipped with a laser pointer to indicate the bit of the ribbon we should be looking at :-(
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?