Slashdot Mirror
The Secret Origins of Microsoft Office's Clippy
Harry writes "Most folks think that Microsoft Office's Clippy, Microsoft Bob, and Windows XP's Search Assistant dog were perverse jokes — but a dozen years' worth of patent filings shows that Microsoft took the concept of animated software 'helpers' really, really seriously, even long after everyone else realized it was a bad idea. And the drawings those patents contain are weirdly fascinating." The article, a slide show really, spreads over 15 pages.
...The Aristocrats... Ba-dum-dum...
Loading...
Who cares where Clippy is from. I just want it to die.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Oh how I hated that piece of software. Cleaning up a system after that usually meant reinstalling. And several users insisted that they needed it. Go figure.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Why is this story a big deal? The same thing is true of Howard the Duck, and Jar-Jar Binks.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
...gets its facts wrong in the first paragraph.
Like someone says in the comments, Clippy has been around since Office 98.
That being said, I always though Microsoft's weird fascination with these things went a little too far -- anyone else remember the 20 or so different animated characters that you could get to help you in Windows XP, just to use the File Search feature?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Dont laugh at my zoophilia, you insensitive clod!
Yeah, well, if it ain't on YouTube, it didn't happen. Thanks for playing.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
The animated Microsoft characters - MS Agents - you could stick in websites and applications were pretty useful sometimes.
I used to use them in software written for kids, such as for learning basic numeracy, or spelling. A child reacts well to a little robot or santa flying round the program and asking them to do things.
I used one once as a tour guide to show people round a pretty large website I used to maintain. That was more an experiment than anything, but it got a lot of use.
I also ported it over to delphi once, it proved to be an entertaining exercise.
I wouldn't be so sure that such avatars are finished with yet, although clippy and that damn search window dog are good examples of when it can be misapplied
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Whatever happened to just yelling "first post?"
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Clippy, Bob and Dog. I thought everyone knew Satan was behind them. You think it's a coincidence that Dog is God backwards?
Made it to Slide 9 before the site got Slashdotted... My favorite was the slide with the two pissed-off teddy bears. They'd make great Office Assistants: "How the f*ck can we help you today?"
I don't know but somehow I just feel like these guys earn it more when they actually come up with some copypasta I haven't read before.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I remember taking some Microsoft certification tests. Now mind you that in order to pass, you must answer things the Microsoft way regardless of whether they were correct or not. Several of the questions on their programming tests involved user interfaces. Invariably, there would be a couple questions on using animated assistants. Now, the correct answer is to never use an animated assistant. But, being a Microsoft test if you saw "animated assistant", that was the Microsoft choice. After failing the first test, I learned "turn the brain off when entering the exam room and turn it on when you leave". Never failed a Microsoft test after that.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
As a software developer you should know that some ideas are good and some are bad....but sometimes you never know if you don't try. The key here is innovation and experimentation. The problem is, often nobody remember your little small innovations that went well: nobody now remembers who introduced the small waved underlines that are now standard in every spell checker in the world. Nobody now remembers who introduced tutorialized tasks. In 10 years nowbody will remember who introduced the ribbon. But everybody will remember the innovations that went wrong, like clippy and friends.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
"Modulating the Behavior of an Animated Character to Reflect Beliefs Inferred About a Userâ(TM)s Desire for Automated Services"
I think if they'd put this into practice I might have finally gotten to see Clippy take a lot of something high calibre to the face.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Would it KILL you to to bring me a friggin' STRAW???
davecb5620@gmail.com
Me too. It's like uh.. a medal. Of retardation. Still a medal, though.
I used to work at a software contracting house about 16-18 years ago. We worked on "Microsoft Home" project. There were two programs: "Fine Artist" and "Creative Writer" for kids. (code name "splat") It had an animated helper, "Pablo Picknoseo" (yes: pik-nOs-O") it seems to be some time before these patents. I still got the tee shirt.
The Picaso family objected to the name of the character and they renamed him.
I left that company as they were billing Microsoft by the hour, but paying salary. Microsoft was changing things on a weekly basis, but not adjusting the release schedule. The company was neither adding engineers nor fighting back on the schedule, just demanding we work more. It was crazy.
Yeah, I'm pretty curious but I'm not going to click 15 times to read the article err "slide show". I'm not you clicking monkey!
I just realized what that post is supposed to be -- it's like a "mental DNS" attack to fark up the rest of the discussion.
Probably a rogue Microsoft patent attorney!
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
I always thought that Clippy was born out of one of Ballmer's experiments in the basement of the Microsoft lair.
One night during a bad storm a customer support rep disappeared, and a kitten, and a chair... next day, Clippy was born.
Something along those lines?
It looks like you're trying to create a slideshow about me. Would you like to...
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
For an article interested in the "Secret Origins of Clippy", they did a good job noting that this all started with the failed Microsoft Bob ("I see you've mistyped your password. Would you like to change it?"
But for all the secrecy they've uncovered in these public patent filings, they seemed to have missed that the program manager of MS Bob was Melinda French, who later became Melinda Gates. I understand she later worked with the team that gave the world the MS Office Assistant (clippy) as well as the Search animations that show up starting around Windows XP.
I guess it's anyone's guess whether there was any nepotism driving this as a marketable feature, even when it was regularly reviled by their users.
"nobody now remembers who introduced the small waved underlines .. tutorialized tasks .. the ribbon"
WordPerfect highlights poor grammar or incorrect word usage with a wavy blue underline
Apple Guide Isn't Help
tabbed toolbars or the Component palette as it was called in Delphi
davecb5620@gmail.com
It is now appearant that Microsoft and Dell are teaming up, not only to outsource tech support to India, but to hire Indian tech support that cant even read!
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
"Hi, I noticed you're writing a ransom letter. Would you like a few pointers? If you use more threatening language, you can probably get a lot more money. Also, make sure you use gloves when you print the letter so the police can't track your finger prints"
Clippy was Melinda Gates' idea. Hence the emphasis on making it work.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Allegedly, Clippy annoyed people into looking in the help files to figure out how to turn him off. That led them to discover that the help file actually was helpful. This reduced the give-away service calls by some measured percent.
Probably not Clippy's intended purpose, but there you go. :)
-- Cerebus
I'm surprised we didn't see this important product listed.
Who cares where Clippy is from. I just want it to die.
I'll tell you what I want to die - Web sites that spread an article out one paragraph at a time over 15 pages where the spam-to-content ratio is 15 to 1.
I'm sorry, but I didn't read the article, since I didn't get past page one of fifteen.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
About "Earl", the internet search assistant:
this is apparently what Microsoft was doing to enhance Web search at the same time that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were founding Google.
Burn!
The only "Clippy" jokes I remember were those posted - endlessly - to Slashdot. It left me wondering - and not for the first time - whether the geek lived in a little world of his own. How many users simply accepted - even welcomed - a touch of humor, color and animation on their office desktop.
the "Office Assistant" paperclip who was introduced in Office 2007 and only departed the scene completely when the company released Office 2008 for the Mac a year ago.
If only we had to put up with it for a year, it wouldn't have been that bad...
... look at how many multi-frame comic chat avatars people have created just so they could look like Space Ghost or Smurfette on IRC.
According to an article, "Papa Smurf took pity on her and took her to his laboratory, where they locked themselves in for several days before emerging."
I wonder what happened?
When I was working at Microsoft, these little buggers were popular in the Office Suite...I hated them...
But a group of us were talking and found that it would be cool to SDK the utility that makes them so that we could make our own...
We wanted a Kosh (the Vorlon from Babylon 5), an Invader Zim, Gir (from Invader Zim) among others...
Yes, lots of Copyright Issues...but come on, wouldn't it be cool to have your own character, AND to have your own phrases and even add voice to it all...
But the Office Team wouldn't let us have a copy of the development tool...not even for our own enjoyment, even if we couldn't SDK the thing...
You can make something as unholy as Clippy without it.
...an employee bonus program based on the number of patent filings.
FYI
The article says, "...Clippy, the âoeOffice Assistantâ paperclip who was introduced in Office 2007 and only departed the scene completely when the company released Office 2008."
I'm pretty sure Clippy winked his first annoying wink in Office 97, not 2007.
...it's just that Microsoft's initial implementation was poor IMHO. The whole concept is great. At my work, we have available a tremendous amount of online training through a combination of video and PDF, etc. The thing is that what Microsoft didn't study, or perhaps did but didn't understand is that since childhood, kids are raised to see cartoon charactors as, for the most part, a little retarded. So anyone seen using a cartoon charactor to teach them concepts and usage of a software program will be seen as being retarded.
I bet that if they had done a proper, professional, and serious implentation, that it might have gone better for them.
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
I'm sure that Melinda French (later to become Melinda Gates) being the project manager for the Microsoft Bob project had nothing to do with the fact Microsoft ran with it for so long.
You know, as much as everyone hates Clippy, Microsoft sold so many copies of Office that there's bound to be a few million people that like him. I would be willing to bet that anyone who wrote a spreadsheet with a clippy like help system would wind up making a pretty good amount of money. For what its worth, I think today's Office help absolutely sucks compared to Clippy. FOr me, that text box of asking what Clippy I wanted to do was usually pretty damn good. Clippy always came through for me.
I think the idea of a personified computer, creating one that expresses interaction, is something that Microsoft should have stuck it out with. Someday, some competitor is going to look at the ashes of clippy, and bob, have an "aha moment", identify where it all went wrong, and everyone will be cheering a great breakthrough in technology.
It wouldn't be the first time this happened. The US car companies put a lot of money into a lot of automotive and engine technologies that didn't see a practical light of day, and, ultimately, the likes of Toyota and Honda would pick up the pieces and run with them in the late 1980s and establish themselves not just as low cost alternatives but as technology players.
And, I will tell you, I know exactly what Microsoft's failure was with Clippy, right when I announce my new Storky based help in my spreadsheet!
This is my sig.
Take it from me. Clippy is received a lot better than my Pedo-bear search assistant.
Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
My all time favorite Clippy piece, but the language is not family friendly... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6aXzMuYN7U Interesting use of Clippy as a character http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjC_0HkLgi8
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
It is amazing that after all this time we can only talk about Microsoft and its outrages, annoyances, and foibles. We shouldn't need to grumble about talking paper clips, we should be able to choose a suitable, highly professional OS. The area of personal/desktop computing is notably lacking in any real commercial competitors. Why has no one stepped up to challenge this ridiculous hegemony?
Note: Linux was never intended to compete with Microsoft. Linux has been developed only for its own sake, and if it succeeds in supplanting some Microsoft usage this is purely incidental to its main purpose.
Slide 4 is probably related to Microsoft Comic Chat, an experimental IRC client that came out of Microsoft Research years ago (and incidentally the origin of the Comic Sans font). It basically took an IRC conversation and made it look like a comic strip, where each member of the conversation had a different character, and their words would appear as speech bubbles. You could also make your character have different expressions. All in all it was pretty cool and actually worked pretty well. It never really took off though because it accomplished all this by prepending metadata to your messages: if the people you were talking to were using MS Chat, they would see your character smile or frown or something; if they used any other client it'd just be a bunch of gibberish before your message.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
You can download an "enhanced" incarnation of the little dude for free at:
http://www.rjlsoftware.com/software/entertainment/clippy/
Can we quit getting links to site that give you like 3 lines of text per page? Despite having broadband it still take longer to load the damn thing than to read it so I won't. Let them get their ad hits from someone else.
is fscking Clippy
A relative of mine (name withheld) was working at Microsoft at the time, in their MS Office division. He told me some great stories about this "animated help assistant" they were working on for the next release.
The best bit, and most telling, was the huge political infighting about what the avatar would be. One group lobbied for a cartoon dude wearing a Microsoft t-shirt, because you should have the concept that "Microsoft is helping you" or some such. Another group wanted a cartoon dog to answer questions - they argued that version 1 of whatever Microsoft did would suck, that the avatar would often misunderstand questions so would give wrong answers, thus it would be better to have a smart dog occasionally get it wrong, than a Microsoft guy look stupid.
This person left Microsoft before the avatar was decided, so I don't know why Microsoft decided a magic, talking paperclip was the best solution.
Fact: all "first posts" were done by Clippy. MS decided he needed to automatically do that. Over the years he's grown unstable.
It was already annoying in Starlost.
What's amazing is that most people put up with crapware (it's an interesting exercise to turn off animated menus when confronted with them for the first time), but in this case it was so detested that 'Kill Clippy' became almost a cult call.
I use a number of very expensive tools from PCB design suite vendors, and the disconnect between those specifying the software and the needs of the users is astounding - just as with Clippy ;)
--------------
A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a Unicorn.
In a case like this, how does one distinguish between a bad idea, and a bad implementation of a good idea?
On the surface, an animated helper seems like a reasonable idea (at least, to anyone who hasn't been exposed to Clippy). But when Microsoft implemented it, it went horribly awry. Since we've only got that one data point, how do we know that it was the idea itself that was flawed, rather than Microsoft's lousy implementation?
Maybe the animated assistant is too far ahead of its time, or is a solution in search of a problem. Maybe Microsoft shouldn't have given Clippy such a damn smarmy attitude, or made it easier to get him out of your face, especially for the expert users.
20 years from now, will this conversation sound like a quaint "It is impossible to build a flying machine that is heavier than air?"
Student: Is it true that the foundation of the universe is paradox?
Master: Well, yes and no.
I liked clippy and the other animated 'helpers'. What I did not like was the 1-3 minute system pause to load them. The rather limited animated helpers brought a bit of interest to my daily duldrums. If they instantly appeared when I pressed 'F1' and had a rich bank of animations effects then I would start using them again. Typically when I need help I want it fairly quickly not two or three minutes later.
The original implementation of "Clippy" was based on extensive research in computer-assisted help, and it did a very good job--only showing up when you really needed help, and almost always being right about what you needed help on.
What went wrong is that marketing people decided it did not show up enough, and so Clippy was dumbed way down, so that it would show up much more frequently.
There was a fascinating article a few years ago by the guy whose research project Clippy came from, discussing this and the path from cutting-edge technology to annoying pest that Clippy was forced down.
Well, a disk array's latency got up, that's what happened :)
it's explained then..
Fact: all "first posts" were done by Clippy. MS decided he needed to automatically do that. Over the years he's grown unstable.
Since clippy only communicates via offering help, he necessarily offered help to himself while posting, setting off infinite recursion, and creation of thousands of personalities? I think you've mistaken him for twitter.
Most folks think that Microsoft Office's Clippy, Microsoft Bob, and Windows XP's Search Assistant dog were perverse jokes. [need citation]
I've never heard this opinion before, to be honest. They obviously share a pedigree (no pun intended), but no company puts that much research, development, and sales investment into something they don't expect to give returns.
I really liked the cat assistant ...
I loved it, going through my screen, doing funny things ... I couldn't resist clicking on animate now and then ... It was always on on my workbench.
I want my Clippy-cat back !!!
Sorry. Please rephrase in terms of a car analogy. For instance, "The change of subject at the ending was so fast it gave me whiplash."
(I admit it, I LOL'd at the trollpasta. That one was pure win. If this is an indication of the trolling we can expect in the new year, I say "MOAR!")
If they would have started with Frankeinstein or a four eyed slug that continually leaves slime all over your word documents -- people would buy the software just for the innovative help system.
I was thinking that Clippy was the name of the frog from starfox but then I remembered it was really Slippy. Even flying frogs would be an improvement over a fricking paperclip and a cartoon einstein.
in the mid-90s by some of the cognitive researchers at the center of the whole anthropomorphic-character thing at Microsoft. I'm not having any luck finding it online, but the gist was: People react to computers the way they react to people.
It was filled with fascinating experiments. They'd have people work with one of two "expert system" programs - one of which subtly complimented the user's knowledge, and one of which didn't. Invariably, the friendly system would be rated as "more accurate".
Or: People watched a news program on one of two TV sets. One was unlabeled; the other was labeled "news" (and, IIRC, in the presence of other such "special purpose" TV sets labelled entertainment, sports, etc.) Those who watched on the special-purpose News TV were more likely to call the program "authoritative".
If you'd read that book, it was almost impossible NOT to come to the conclusion that things like Bob, Clippy, etc. would make average consumers far more comfortable - and productive - with computers. It was blindingly obvious from the studies, and, like so many wrong ideas, it seemed perfectly reasonable, and jibed with evolutionary psychology, etc. etc.
A few years ago, someone in the field told me that the truth eventually came out: The researchers had either fudged or misinterpreted their data. Oops.
Splitting what could essentially be a 1 page article into 15 pages, just to cram in needless advertising and SEO links to blogs and social networks does NOT a slideshow make. Just call a spade a damn spade, please.
Before Bob came out I saw a news report about Microsoft. They interviews some guy working on future company technology, an animated assistant. It was a Parrot I believe.
I'm not sure why some people seem to be obsessed with interacting with anthropomorphic machines. There are over 6 billion people in the world, surely you can find one of them to talk to.
A computer is a computer. People use them more like a book that is updated in real-time than anything else. We should simply let it be what it is and try to improve on the way people interact with it. It makes no sense to try to trick users into believing they are interacting with something else. That can only lead to confusion and problems.
The same thing goes you anthropomorphic robot-builders out there. Why build something that acts like a human? We already have lots of those. The whole point of automation is that it can do things that are difficult for us to do by hand. It doesn't make sense that an efficient robot would look like a human, because the mere fact that we need or want a robot to do it implies that the human form does not lend itself to the task.
My god... twitter IS clippy!!! (dun-dun-DUNN!!!)
As I was leaving, [...] pasty white guy, goat*s*e, walked in [...] He looked like a real fag.
What the... he walks around like that??? :O
that watching Disney animations will rot a child's mind
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Clippy was silly only because they mixed bad animation with bad scripts.
If this was customizeable it would rule.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It's just way ahead of its time, and it wasn't very "smart".
Face it, today's software packages are so complicated that a "joe sixpack" user not only doesn't use more than 5% of their features - he doesn't even know those features are there.
As AI advances, it will become possible to figure out exactly what user is doing and provide highly contextual assistance, possibly in response to a spoken question. I.e. in Excel you just say "how do I highlight negative cells in column C in pink?" and it just shows you how to do it or (gasp) just does it for you.
I am often reminded of the misery of "regular" users when I use various CAD packages. Those would benefit from some AI and heavily contextual help.
My 5 year old son is scared at night because Clippy is under the bed.
True story, he told me.
Normally I would agree with you, but what this guy did was way funnier. I never expected the twist at the end.
I was involved heavily in end-user training when Office 97 came out, and we were all flown to Sydney to listen to some dude from MS to 'train' us in all the 'important' features of the 'groundbreaking' release of Office 97. The features they focussed on were none of the important ones that end-users truly asked questions about, but I recall them very heavily pushing these clippy assistants.
Back at that time the idea of net meeting, video conferencing and remote connection were the 'in' thing. We were all basically told that we would become totally redundant as trainers, because we were going to be replaced by these 'just in time' training tools. All training would be delivered by computer, and nobody would ever need a full time trainer again. (Roll ahead 12 years and I'm still working in face-to-face training, but that's not the point of this reply). I believe Microsoft thought that people wanted this 'just in time' (JIT - seriously, that's what they called it) interface to work - they wanted us to spend hours teaching people how to use it.
Seriously, the first question any of us asked was 'how do you turn it off'. We got lectured by the MS person as to why turning it off was akin to trying to bring about the end of the world. I recall that in every basic user class we had (and some more advanced levels) the question 'how do you turn it off' was asked an inordinate number of times, at least until Office 2007.
Is/was Microsoft Bob, their failed (horribly) attempt at making a "better" UI for windows users with zero computer experience. If you've ever seen a demo of Bob, then the moment you saw clippy, the dog in xp, etc, you knew the source.
They are further proof of the fact that ms believes that they know better than you do what you want to do, and they could not accept that Bob was not the be-all-and-end-all of user interface designs, so they simply inserted some small bits of Bob into their other programs in the form of clippy and the search dog, etc. This was probably from a thought process that went "Bob is the next best thing since sliced bread, but maybe it just was too overwhelming, so lets insert a little bit of Bob and gradually work the users over to our way of thinking." The learned, of course, that it wasn't that Bob was overwhelming, it was that Bob was simply wrong for anyone older than the age of four. But they could not accept that fact, for they, being MS, know best, and so, here we are, with clippy and the xp search dog.
Here's a news story about Clippy: http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s8i23456
The movie "Until the End of the World" has an entertaining scene where a Russian search agent took on the shape of a Bear that was prowling around 3D representation of different buildings, which in turn represented different agencies and thus different databases, while muttering in a bearish voice: "Searching ... stiiiillllleee searching". This was in 1991. It was hilarious! There were other avatars, as well, and they all had different personalities that matched the person using them. This is not, some irritating marketing guy deciding what persona that you would like, along with the rest of the world. Think Tamaguci with a difference; collaborative filtering on a personal scale.
For instance, my avatar would be a cockroach that I could squash with a satisfying crunch - before it would wait and skitter away. Even better if I could fry it with my iPhone G4's sonic iLighter. But, that's merely my own preference. Your preferred skin may be a bash window, Paris Hilton in prison stripes, or both.
To each their own.
Yup, I remember that. The ladies around 40 stereotype in GP's post is certainly not true. But rationally speaking, there was little use for it. I just dragged it to a corner of the screen on some empty toolbar space where it would sleep and occasionally pop up when a dialog box opened. Not much different than those little window companion toys. And it only worked because I used Word almost always maximized or in fullscreen, making the unused area predictable. System wide it would just have gotten in the way, I think.
Yeah, that would be so awesome if I could hear him say "It looks like you're trying to attach two pieces of paper together. Maybe I can help?".
I will go out on a limb here and say that the digital assistant is an idea that is yet to be fully realized.
Clippy, or something like it will be a regular feature of computers years from now. With improved AI, processing power, speech recognition, always on Internet connections and better search engines a virtual assistant will be able to really do something for users other than annoy them.
People who aren't nerds/geeks//. readers would likely find comfort in having a "little man" in the computer that can talk to them and understand what tasks they would like it to perform. Heck, if its good enough even /. readers might want one on their desktops, too.
It's not funny. My brother died that way.
> ..find a lawyer for when Microsoft claims this violates their copyright?
You kid, but I remember reading some version of the MS Agent EULA that said you couldn't use Clippy or any of the other agents to "disparage Microsoft."
So you could add violating the EULA to the copyright claims...
I see this comment a lot, and I suppose that many average Windows users don't see the seams and can't figure out what the fuss is about.
From my point of view as someone who has used Windows heavily for almost two decades, 2007-08 in Microsoft land has been the perfect storm of poor user experience for power users.
Here are the factors:
VISTA
- The configuration dialog shell game that we've come to expect with every new Windows release
- Deeper UI changes to features that I use several times a minute (e.g. alt-tab ordering, language cycling shortcuts) that had previously worked fine the way they were since Windows 95 or before; I'm not sure if Vista's UI designers knew what they were getting rid of
- RAM usage that's off the hook and weird paging performance, thus the push to the x64 version
- The x64 version's remaining hardware and software compatibility issues
- Just general brokenness around configuration behaviour (e.g. language settings), hardware-related functionality (e.g. built-in burning with -RW disks), and general system behaviour (why would it ever make sense to launch the task manager minimized when the task bar becomes unresponsive at the drop of a hat when an app isn't responding?) that ultimately should have been found in testing and fixed before the product got out the door
- I'm sure there are things I'm forgetting about here.
- With all the risk taking with the UI, why not also address underlying OS problems that have been around for years (e.g. mysteriously in-use files getting in the way of deletes and ejecting USB drives, the buggy aforementioned built-in burning?)
- The icing on the cake: Microsoft choosing to stubbornly phase out XP, so most OEM buyers and most corporate buyers are stuck with Vista for new installs even if they (or their staff) would prefer XP. Microsoft's pacing is really what took the patchable brokenness and the performance problems from being theoretical issues to real ones for power users.
OFFICE 2007
- Although not a reason to knock Vista, this is certainly part of the perfect storm, since like Vista, Office 2007 throws out a bunch of the previous product's tried-and-true UI (the whole menu structure) and rethinks it, and MS has taken the same approach to phasing it in as for Vista, so for new installs, it's just as unavoidable as Vista. Because it largely works properly and performs OK (cynical view: higher unit price -> more exhaustive testing?,) and because I can at least come up with plausible explanations for all of the UI changes they made, it's not quite as hard a pill for me to swallow as Vista but still another layer of icing on the cake.
So yeah...
I realize that I'm being a snooty power user here. Not everyone wants or needs backwards compatibility. And although the $100+ retail sticker price and huge market share of Windows suggest that MS should spend a lot on testing, the realities of OEM pricing and keeping the shareholders happy mean that MS has to stretch their usability testing dollar a long way. So, power-user oriented features with limited appeal must get the short end of the stick.
On that note, there are things that Vista has done right:
- The layer of awful networking wizards are a highly nuanced topic in themselves, but despite being harder to avoid than the ones in XP, they seem to have more informative automated functionality and that's ultimately a win
- The search box on the start menu is a killer power-user feature (even if I was going to use Launchy anyway)
- The more detailed performance monitoring in the Task Manager as well as the Performance control panel/snap-in is impressive
- You'll note that I haven't mentioned User Account Control (UAC) in the minuses... That's because, despite the warts (e.g. tapping my fingers while a low priority process waits to redraw the whole screen that it has just taken over) I think UAC is a real security improvement for power users and has been sorely needed for a long time... BUT I can certainly understand that for averag
A troll I have never seen and a truly great one to boot! Its going to be a great new year!
zosxavius photography
If everyone hates clippy so much, I wonder why the OpenOffice.org has assistant too? And yes, last time I checked - it was on by default.
Clippy always annoyed me (as did his other incarnations), but I think the search doggy is cute and fun. The problem I always had with the Clippy stuff was that anything I needed help with, he was actually pretty obnoxious to get an answer out of, PLUS he sat there cycling animations when I was doing work, which I didn't actually like. Whereas the search dog comes up when you press the search button, and he always asks the same thing- the cartoon just serves as a graphical grounding for your mouse.
I dunno, the dog always struck me as a little animated assistant done correctly.
When I worked at Microsoft id Access tech support back in 94-95 we had a name for the animated office assistant: SFRB
Stupid Fucking Red Ball
A story I directly heard from an (at the time) Microsofty who was on the Word team and allegedly in the room when it was demoed to Bill:
Bill took one look at it and said "How do I get rid of the f***ing paper clip."
Little did he know, that would be the most popular Google search that year.
The inclusion of avatars is a sound technique backed by 15+ years of research when it comes to e-learning. It is a totally acceptable (and even expected) tool of sound instructional design. The problem with Microsoft is they took it out of the realm of e-learning and put it in your face every moment of every computer function.
At work, we recently "upgraded" from Win2k to XP, and I got my first experience with the dog. We deployed a release to production which had a bug in it, and I needed to find all references to the broken routine *FAST*. So I called up the handy-dandy search screen with the cute little mutt and put in the text I wanted to find in the files. No matches. WTF? Did I spell it wrong? No. There was 1 file I knew had it, so I opened it, found the text and than ran the same search again against that 1 file. Still didn't find it. OK, so search for text within files doesn't work.
I later found out that the search for text with in a file only works with .TXT files (I mean, no-one would ever want to search another type of file, right?). You can get it to work with the following, easy procedure:
"To configure Windows XP to search all files no matter what the file type, obtain the latest service pack for Windows XP and then turn on the Index file types with unknown extensions option.
If you use this method, Windows XP searches all file types for the text that you specify. This can affect the performance of the search functionality. To do this:
1. Click Start, and then click Search (or point to Search, and then click For Files or Folders).
2. Click Change preferences, and then click With Indexing Service (for faster local searches).
3. Click Change Indexing Service Settings (Advanced). Note that you do not have to turn on the Index service.
4. On the toolbar, click Show/Hide Console Tree.
5. In the left pane, right-click Indexing Service on Local Machine, and then click Properties.
6. On the Generation tab, click to select the Index files with unknown extensions check box, and then click OK.
7. Close the Indexing Service console.
Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
322756 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756/ ) How to back up and restore the registry in Windows
Network administrators can configure this setting by modifying the registry. To do this, set the FilterFilesWithUnknownExtensions DWORD value to 1 in the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex"
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
I thought it was standard Slashdot knowledge that those projects were personal children of Melinda Gates, the secretary Bill fell in love with and married. As far as I heard, she came up with MS Bob, Clippy, and so on. (Female urge to help. Good intention. Bad execution.) And because he loved her so much, he could not tell her what a load of crap she produced. So he tried to help an support her. You can go real big, if your man has 100 billion, is the boss of a huge company, and does everything for you.
And that's how little Bob and Clippy were born.
Luckily, there came a time, when he was able to tell her.
It's strange, imagining this side of Bill... At least he got a girl.
Imagine an SM relationship with Ballmer instead. THAT would make for a fucked up version of Windows and Office.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
He was customizable (kinda). You could control what he said with VBA scripts.
I must be new here...