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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.
I think the general annoyance of clippy was the fact it kept popping up whenever you did something. In many ways it was actually successful for Office. It showed people that they could use other features that people didn't know it had. Which really did put a nail in the coffin for tools such as word perfect. Now that people know how to do a lot of these advanced features and got use to them, they got frustrated when other word processors don't have or they don't know where the features they enjoy are. That being said because Microsoft successfully monopolized the Office software, they don't need advertise all there features all the time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio. Clippy, the Microsoft assistant, was found dead in his Redmond, Seattle apartment this morning. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
"The rumours of my death are somewhat exaggerated."
Clippy is alive and well - he's been ported to linux so that we can hate him too ...
http://vigor.sourceforge.net/screenshots/
I think the "I'm alright, thank you, fuck off" response pretty much sums it up...
They talk about UI consistency!
Consistency or not, it was a huge failure of something in the development process.
I mean, the HATE heaped upon poor Clippy, from the most novice to the most advanced of users, is hard to comprehend. For something to be so wrong for such a wide range of users means it is truly bad. How on Earth did this get past the supposedly rigorous user-testing facility that Microsoft has? Nobody said at some point, "You know, that Clippy thing isn't really helpful. It just gets in the way and is annoying." Nobody? For years?
From the article, after talking about people who liked him: "There were also an equal number of people who looked at it as interference or an annoyance..." Equal? Equal?!! What kind of bizarro statistics is MS collecting from their user feedback system that it took them years to figure out the problem and at least turn it off by default?
R.I.P.
rust in pieces.
The death was not too quick or easy.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Yep, Clippy was definitely incoherent.
When you were pulling your hair out trying to expose the BCC field, who saved your ass?
Who taught a million admin-assists where to learn how to mail-merge?
ALRIGHT....I admit it.....Clippy was my......lover.
IS THAT SO WRONG?
It's kinda gross and gory, but ... *sniff* oh I can't say anything more! It was horrible! *SOB*
t rip089.html
http://www.thenoobcomic.com.nyud.net:8090/daily/s
"Hello! It looks like you're writing an article. Would you like me to:
"By Lamport's Beard! What are you doing here?!"
"Well, Microsoft chucked me out."
"How the hell did..."
"It's this Emacs thing — got a darn powerful LISP engine, you know. It's very roomy in here."
"Oh, sorry, it's not that big. He's been evicted. Now, about that article—"
"Look... just... bugger off!" [Click!]
"Hello! It looks like you're writing an document. Would you like me to:
"Sod off and die."
"Oh."
"Yes, 'Oh'! Now get out of Emacs before I drag Donald E. Knuth himself over here."
"No need to get nasty. Hmmph."
A few hours later:"Hello! It looks like you're trying to evaluate an integral. Would you like me to:
- Add limits?
- Draw a graph?
- Do a trick?
Oh, and by the way, it's very roomy in here!"It was Steve Balmer in the library with a chair.
[Insert pithy quote here]
anyone seen the vi clippy? http://www.petebevin.com/archives/vim.gif
Why UNIX?
I have no doubt there will be many badly flawed milestones to come along the path to a coherent AI assistant. It is something too cool not to aspire to even if the results are going to be awful for years to come.
So far the most memorable I've seen was a shareware "Southern" parody of Microsoft Bob that involved an outhouse and, if I remember correctly, a possum.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
- Trolling
- Being interesting or informative
- Posting something obvious
- Flamebaiting
Drat, there's no help for being funny =(I'm sure the droids in Redmond think this is a quantum leap in functionality too.
"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.
Could someone put down that miserable dog in the XP search module?
It's far worse than the media are reporting. Rumors of Clippy's impending dismissal have been bubbling around for years, and they had finally started to wear the noble Clippy down. First he started stopping on the way home for a couple or three double shots. This made his wife, Tacki, suspicious and she started nagging about that and asking when he was finally gonna get a promotion. Well, he asked & they promised him the job that was ultimately given to Ozzi.
..." or chanting a strange mantra, "Longhorn, Lamehorn, Foghorn-Leghorn." Treatments didn't help. Eventually, Tacki ran off with with a stapler and his son Gui ended up smoking crack and huffing glue. The final straw, was when his beloved, musically gifted daughter, Bandi, got a "Theo is my Hero" tatoo and joined the OpenBSD project to write theme-songs and documentation. Poor guy, his intentions were really good, and he tried so damn hard.
Folks tried to tell him not to count on it, but he ignored them, saying "Would Chair-boy lie to me? Never!" When that news broke, so did Clippy. Lots of double-, and triple-shots, and he was occasionally found wandering around "the Campus" with a bottle of Muscatel in a bag, mumbling incoherently, "To C# or not to C#, that
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
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.
Some time ago, I was writing a lab book with Word. I had already typed more than a page when Clippy suddenly realized something and came up with the following dialogue (translated):
"Apparently you're trying to write a letter. Please choose one of the following options:
[ ] Use the letter assistant.
[ ] Write the letter without assistance."
Clippy gave me no other choice, I needed to select one of these options.
I'd have chosen the following if it were available:"[X] Stop bugging me, this isn't even a letter!"
where's all that Karma?
Thank you preview for screwing up and showing me the line breaks but not actually posting it that way...
Well the new UI fits better with vista and for the lower end users of word, you know the ones that could never afford to buy it anyway, everything they need is right there in the shortcuts. My problem with word is that it has too many damned retarded features that will make me strangle a man with his own tie if I ever see him using them in a business report.
My schools business college requires I take a fundamentals of the PC class, which is actually a class dedicated to microsoft products. Word,Power point, and excel, I figure I can pass this no problem so I go to take the test and it wants me to tell it how to put a specific type of word art in the paper or how to add embellishment to the letters. Why in gods name would I ever use word art in a business report? Do I work for fucking kindergarteners?
I know where the word art is, it's hard to miss. But I don't know the names of them and I don't ever want to know the names of them.
Clippy Goes Undercover
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJCv8ru3L98
Clippy Gets Clipped
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB03aRifPLU
Clippy faces facts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMShkAZR1-Q&NR
I never understood the unabashed Clippy hatred. It was certainly a more friendly window to the whole help interface since it's much easier for a novice to ask a question than rummage through indices. It was one checkbox to turn the little bugger off, and you could choose something that you thought was less annoying if that was the problem. (I've almost always used the dog.) Not to mention that he's being going away more and more the past few versions: "It looks like you are writing a letter" is becoming about as relevant as the 95-thru-Me era BSOD.
I agree with the new notions that the Office user interface team has chosen to adopt, like only being able to access a feature from one place. Jensen Harris is a smart guy and I've been enjoying reading his weblog and the trials and tribulations of the Ribbon and the new UI as a whole.
This exactly sums up my experience with those little assistants.
While the idea in itself isn't bad, the execution just didn't work. The help offered was either completely off the mark (as above) or apparently targeted at people who had seen a computer for the first time just the week before (a bit like the Windows on-line help - this is how you format a floppy).
I haven't used MS office a lot since I don't use Windows but get exposed to it every now and then and could use a decent interactive assistant since I don't know my way around it very well. OTOH of course it's pretty much the same as any other such piece of software so I can always find what I'm looking for by poking around a bit. But a competent assistant would be a time saver.
It would however be very difficult to do properly.
I guess users are better off without the assistant than with screen space devoted to a useless one.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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.
Sure, it's easy to only remember the bad times. But who among us can honestly say we won't miss him? His knowing winks, his cute little antics. His sage, though sometimes random and unrelated, wisdom. I already feel a piece of my heart missing and I fear it will never be clipped back together.
Cue Cinderella's "Don't Know What You've Got Til It's Gone".
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.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
It seems like you are remaking the UI. Would you like help with making it more disneylandish?
On a serious note, I honestly don't get it. The new interface is pretty cartoonish (though simple to use for a first time user). If clippy isn't coherent with this UI than I don't know what is.
Also the big overhaul isn't about coherency in the first place since to change the color of outlook interface, you have to open MS word and customize it's options.
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.
"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".
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
the proof is here
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
...the witch is dead, the witch is dead!
Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead...
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.