If you’ve ever gotten your hands on a computer in the late 90’s or early 2000’s, chances are you’re familiar with Clippy. This anthropomorphic staple marked an entire generation, being one of the most famous and hated features of Microsoft Word. Constantly interrupting users he claimed to help, this little virtual assistant had something slightly pedantic about him.
But did you know that behind this now legendary character lies a fascinating part of the history of modern computing? the Seattle Metlocal newspaper of the big city of Washington State, investigated Clippy’s birth and death to try to understand how a simple idea turned into a complete failure.
A too lusty Clippy
At the beginning of Clippy there was Bob, software that should make Windows 95 easier to use to newbies. Karen Fries, a Microsoft engineer, was tasked with evaluating how people who, for the most part, had never interacted with a computer behaved with the software developed by the company. Unfortunately, the tests were rarely conclusive, the guinea pigs were mostly lost in the face of the complex interfaces of the operating system. Karen Fries then came up with the idea of adding a small virtual owl (later replaced by a dog called Rover), which was supposed to guide new users and replace the austere manuals provided at the time.
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Bob turned out to be a bitter failure and the software was scrapped even before the release of Windows 98. The idea of a virtual mascot, on the other hand, found a privileged place in the development of Microsoft Office. The Rover dog was then replaced by the Hopper rabbit, before the Clippy trombone took over for technical reasons: an animal is more difficult to animate than a trombone. The design of the first Clippy sparked a lot of debate within Microsoft, particularly because its big eyes and looks had a rather creepy lusty side at the time, according to beta testers of the application. A problem that the tribe of male engineers had not foreseen, nor even noticed …
Clippy’s redemption
After some design revisions, the Clippy as we know it was born and accompanied the release of Microsoft Office 97, before retiring five years later, in 2003. In the meantime, the general public had begun to become familiar with computer interfaces and Clippy was become useless, even painful. But if the personal assistant too quick to interrupt is today the symbol of a certain Microsoft failure, the likeable character has remained. So much so that he recently returned as an emoji to Microsoft’s library.
The investigation of Seattle Met it is worth its quarter of an hour of reading. Let’s find out how Clippy ended up fanfiction erotic, what nickname – what decency prevents us from translating here – Bill Gates gave it, and how Microsoft’s corporate culture at the time gave birth to the Clippy we dearly love to hate.
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