***** congrats on the 19k grub, ed! *****
from LangaList Plus! Edition 2001-04-19....
R.I.P. Clippy
Reader Claudia Slate found a strange page:
officeclippy.com
It's an about-face for Microsoft: After making a big deal of "digital
assistants" like "Clippy," the animated paperclip in MS Office products,
this site is devoted entirely to dissing the animated helpers, which
will go away (hooray!) in Windows XP.
The digital assistant technology traces back to "Microsoft Bob," one of
the stupidest Microsoft products I've ever seen: It was Windows with a
user interface so dumbed-down and smarmy it was embarrassing to run; an
insult to every user with more brains than a cabbage.
"Bob" quickly went away--- it was a well-deserved marketing disaster---
but its technology resurfaced in the animated help systems of Microsoft
Office. Most adults I know find the animations cute for about the first
two minutes, and then turn them off. Apparently, enough other users do
likewise, so these creatures will vanish from the next version of
Windows. About time.
You may ask: If the "Bob" technology was so unpopular, why did it take
so long for Microsoft to dump it? Well, draw your own conclusions, but
Microsoft Bob's original Product Manager, Melinda French, later became
Mrs. Bill Gates. (Really!) |
