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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.
Who cares where Clippy is from. I just want it to die.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
...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
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
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 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."
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.
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
And 'Bob' is 'boB' backwards. Eerie!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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
"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.
There is no way that George Lucas has had a horde of interns and patent attorneys working for the past two decades on Jar Jar Binks.
...an employee bonus program based on the number of patent filings.
...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.
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
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.
I always thought bob backwards was dod.
upside down: pop
backwards and upside down: qoq
transpose:
b
o
b
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 5 year old son is scared at night because Clippy is under the bed.
True story, he told me.
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
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."