- #The adventures of clipy the office assistant drivers#
- #The adventures of clipy the office assistant software#
- #The adventures of clipy the office assistant mac#
What problem the newly formed Microsoft Office team was trying to solve.In this episode, a16z Board Partner and longtime Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky shares his personal remembrances, lore, and archival footage of Clippy with a16z Operating Partner Frank Chen. Ya girl got business cards ?☁️ /1nNBYvlZ1t Exhibit A: the back of Microsoft Cloud Developer Advocate Chloe Condon’s business card, which served as an inspiration for this video: Doesn’t ring a bell? How about this: “ It looks like you’re writing a letter.”Įven though Microsoft officially retired Clippy in April 2011, the character continuously resurfaces as a meme in the cultural zeitgeist. You might remember this feature better as the animated paper clip Clippy, even though Microsoft insists its (his? her?) official name is ClippIt. We all were part of something larger that moved humanity ahead.Before Cortana, before Siri, before Alexa, even before smart interactive voice response (IVR) systems, there was Microsoft’s Office Assistant, one of the first widely deployed digital assistants that shipped as part of Microsoft Office in 1997. Soon Clippy was eliminated all together.Īs Fallows has written of his contribution to progress: “Somehow I feel a solidarity with the gantry engineers who helped prepare for Yuri Gagarin’s launch. In the next version of Office to be released, the version that he was working on, Clippy was turned off by default. “In my spare time, I was inveighing against the maddening feature generally called Clippy,” he has written since. In 1999, James Fallows, The Atlantic’s national correspondent, worked at Microsoft for six months as a sort of writer-consultant. And that’s something, by the way, that a writer for these pages can assert some small responsibility for. The feature was eventually just thrown out. With Clippy, thankfully, the consequences were less grave.
#The adventures of clipy the office assistant drivers#
This meant that air bags could kill or maim female drivers or passengers. For many years, says the documentary, air bags in cars were designed for men, because they were made to the specifications of all-male engineering teams. This isn’t the only case of how design that assumes the prototypical user is male could go awry. It turned out to be one of the most unpopular features ever introduced-especially among female users.
#The adventures of clipy the office assistant software#
The software shipped with 10 male assistants and two female assistants, she adds. Ho continues, saying that the engineers in the room were willing to throw out the focus-group-provided data-data which they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for-because it didn’t cohere to their expectations. I just don’t know what they’re talking about.’ And I said, ‘Guys, guys, look, I’m a woman, and I’m going to tell you, these animated characters are male-looking.’ There’s me and, I think, like, 11 or 12 guys, and we’re going through the results, and they said, ‘I don’t see it. Most of the women thought the characters were too male and that they were leering at them. “We did a bunch of focus-group testing” on Clippy and the other Microsoft Office assistants, Ho says, “and the results came back kind of negative.”
#The adventures of clipy the office assistant mac#
(In the mid-2000s, she led the company’s Mac Business Unit there, and she is one of the few women to speak at an Apple keynote.) Before working at Ericsson, Ho was an executive at Microsoft. In the new documentary Code: Debugging the Gender Gap, Roz Ho, a vice president at Ericsson, describes the meetings that birthed Clippy. He was also the product, I learned this week, of a male-dominated design process. He was a puppet who only knew one script and kept repeating it, at you, throughout the workday. As the Microsoft employee Chris Pratley has written, Clippy was “optimized for first use”: amusing the first time you encountered him, and frustrating after that. He stopped users to ask them if they needed help with basic tasks, like writing a letter or making a spreadsheet. Surely somewhere “Clippy,” as most know him, frolics still, winking at odd intervals, randomly interrupting the Prince of Persia to ask if he needs help writing a letter.Ĭlippy is famous for being one of the worst user interfaces ever deployed to the mass public. And he finally departed this digital veil in 2007, when Microsoft Office dismissed him all together. He went into retirement two years later, when he was turned off by default.
He was refined three years later, in Microsoft Office 2000. He (and he is the right pronoun for this particular mindless bundle of code, but more on that in a moment) was introduced in November 1996.
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