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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.
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!!
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.
The problem with these assistance.
1. Unprofessional. When you are at work. you don't want a cartoon floating around.
2. Based on Statistics. Meaning you are rarely correct, but on the average close. Creating a situation where it is less helpful over all as the work done normally can't be close. It has to correct. So the assistant want to do things kinda like you are doing but in a way that it is wrong.
3. Always in your way. When we work We don't like having things on top of our work.
4. Animation distracts us. Good UI for animation is to put our attention towards something the programmer want you to take notice of. Eg. Element who gets focus, an alert or warning, or something new. But these guys are always moving even when you are doing what you need to do and its overall state hasn't changed, which distracts you from your work.
5. They keep coming back. You close them... They come back again.
6. Arrogant. They assume they are smarter then you. Even if you know what you are doing. "I am not writing a List Damnit! I am filling in data sets in a Top Down order because it is easier that way. "
7. Never tell the disadvantages. The never tell you what the trade off are using that feature. Once you go into list mode you cannot perform calculation on it.
8. Make the computer seem more personal. Yea that is the point but really a computer is a machine and it really should be considered as such. If you get emotionally attached to it. You start to feel bad about using it. Or when problems come up you blame it other then the people your yourself you causes the problems.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If you've been in this business as long as I have, you'll realize that Microsoft's "weird fascination" is not an isolated phenomenon. It's part of a long simmering philosophical division over the design of software that goes back at least to the 1980s and the advent of commercially viable personal computing.
The crux of this debate is this question: exactly how intelligent should software attempt to be on a users behalf? On one end of the spectrum, you have the vision of highly intelligent agents which monitor the world and the user and do things on the user's behalf that the user would do for himself if he would deign to use his valuable attention. The other end of the spectrum isn't quite as easy to characterize, but I'd say it sees the goal of software design as making tools that do exactly what a user asks them to, neither more nor less. We might consider this spectrum as running from proactive or autonomous software on one end to responsive software on the other.
In a nutshell, it's the question of whether we want software agents or software tools that divides designers.
The software agent end of things has always had a kind of futuristic allure, and attracts investment and attention and drives innovation. However, I (being a tools-person) think that making the software do what the user tells it to is a surer path to success. Apple, which I see as mainly a tools oriented design company, coined the term Personal Digital Assistant with the idea that small mobile computers would be agents, but Palm was the company that scored the first success in the PDA market by making a handy device.
Microsoft has always been an agent oriented company. The "Where do you want to go?" slogan has an unexpected facet in that it subtly bodies the software agent philosophy: you specify where you want to be and the agent will take care of the details. Microsoft's design not only hides the details, but often makes the details inaccessible, which means that getting MS software to do what you want often amounts to twiddling poorly or undocumented registry entries.
This isn't about making software intelligent or not, it's about how much initiative you take out of the users' hands.
If you read Tim Berners-Lee's article on the Semantic Web from Scientific American a few years back, you can see that a lot of the benefit envisioned by proponents is in creating intelligent agents that work on users behalf to do things like resolve scheduling conflicts. In the meantime, as Semantic Web technology continues to slowly develop, one of its core functions, searching, has been solved for most uses by better and better "conventional" search technology. Conventional search technology focuses on trying to provide the user the answers he asks for without getting everybody in the world to agree in advance on what the relevant questions might be. It has proved successful beyond what one would have thought a system based on clever indexing rather than an intelligent, semantic understanding of the user's wants could be.
Now, I'm a tools oriented guy, so this is a biased view. I actually think Semantic Web technology is going to be highly useful, but as a way of designing distributed information systems, not as a way of building agents who will fulfill all our information needs because they are intelligent.
Clippy is representative of the agent philosophy. He watches what you do, and offers to take over as much of the task from you as he can. This highlights the central problem with the agent philosophy: we are so far from having technology that understands people that when it tries its just annoying. It's not that agents are useless. The web spidering robots that build search indices are, in a sense, highly specialized software agents, working on a much smaller and manageable problem.
Another solution to the same problem as Clippy is the "wizard". Now I'm not particularly fond of wizards from a design standpoint. For one thing, they are temptations t
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
... your post was more informative than the article.
I know that's a pretty low bar to pass, but you still deserve congratulations.
What really pisses me off about disabling that stupid dog is the way he turns his back on me, and slowly saunters off the screen. No, you stupid mutt! I want you gone NOW, none of this insouciance from you!
BINGO! Give that man a cigar! Home users have no freaking clue how to actually use a PC and I seriously doubt anybody at MSFT, which seems to have seriously been bit by the "I can be as cool as Apple! Really I can! Quit laughing at me!" ever bothered to actually test the GUI with actually home users. I can tell you that home users HATE change! They absolutely positively HATE change! They know where the buttons were before, they knew what to do to do what they needed before, and now they are nothing but frustrated.
Then add on top of that the fact that Vista feels slower than their 4 year old XP machine, the HDD thrashes constantly and takes forever to load(most folks shut down their machines cold at night and so do a cold boot at least once a day, usually several) and sucks RAM and CPU time worse than a drunk sucking down Mad Dog, and you have some seriously pissed off consumers. It has gotten to the point that when a new customer comes in and say "Help! I got this new machine and I can't stand it!" that I just say "You got Vista'd,didn't you?" and the answer always is "Yeah, real hard! And I hate this damned thing! Can you put XP on it?". I'm sure that it would shock most here, but most home users I've dealt with didn't even see the "fisher price" GUI of XP because one of the first things they would ask is "Can you make it look like the old one?" so they would happily take home a machine that looked like Win9X. And don't even get me started on Office 2K7. Not placing an easy way to default to the GUI that everyone has been using since Office 97 was just plain stupid.
Allow me to make a prediction. Write it down, and you watch it come true. If MSFT doesn't fire whichever ass has decided "We can really be like Apple with Win7! No really, we can! Stop making fun of me!" should be the direction of the company instead of making boring, low resource desktop OSes that everyone knows how to use because that is what they have always used, and instead replace quicklaunch and the taskbar with that damned stupid Apple Dock then Win7 is going to go down in flames even faster than Vista. If folks had wanted an Apple they would have freaking bought an Apple. What folks want from MSFT is the same boring as shit they have always gotten, with a little more stability and more drivers included. Add a few little things like native DVD burning and a simple picture editor and they are happy little campers. But if they try to force everyone into this giant Apple ripoff multimedia nightmare then they are going to stay away in droves. I mean have you EVER seen a case like we have now where a new MSFT OS has been out nearly 3 years yet companies like Tigerdirect are bragging Comes with XP Downgrade Rights! in giant letters to sell their machines? Hell I didn't see folks run from a MSFT OS this fast when WinME was unleashed with all its evil upon the world(Bill STILL owes me an apology for THAT one,asshole!)
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.