I do think the hate is overblown and a little immature. Maybe it felt a little silly if you were already a computer expert in 1995, or just hated Microsoft in general as was en vogue at the time, but the character served an important purpose. The Microsoft Office suite was huge, could be overwhelming, and still came with 20 pounds of printed manuals. Was the average user ever likely to discover the Letter Wizard or the Party Invitation Template? Clippy did do some analysis of the document you were typing and make some helpful suggestions to guide a new user around the program. And you could turn it off.
Personally I will go to bat for Clippy and don’t think he deserves the derision.
> I do think the hate is overblown and a little immature.
It was one of the first examples of computer getting in your way and interfeering with your work. It was like your boss comming every 10 minutes with: " Are you ok ? Can i help you ?
The first thing i did when installing office was turn office assistant off.
Personally, is it immature to dump on clippy? Probably. But after the 10,000 time of that darn thing popping up and asking you a pointless question.. Yes, it gets annoying. I already know what I want to do, why are you harassing me? Did I ask for help? Then no, you're just getting in the way of my job.
Had the privilege of attending a talk given by one of the MS researchers behind Clippy. They were using some very sophisticated ML behind the scenes (Bayes Nets) to interpret intent and guide troubleshooting. The magic of that often goes unappreciated with all of the vitriol / hype around the character.
Here's Eric Horvitz's page on Lumiere, the research project underlying Clippy - http://erichorvitz.com/lum.htm. It's quite sad that the business side hobbled the assistant to the point of making it annoying, mainly because of space reasons (that was also when Office got its first spell check, and the extra space needed for the the more sophisticated assistant modeling was competing for that space).
I never understood the hatred of Clippy. Certainly seems to be from an age where a whimsical touch was allowed in software, nowadays there just seems to be either stern cynicism or forced chuminess in its place.
Then again I was aged below ten when I first played with Office 97.
I remember the hate well. Clippy was this obnoxious know it all who did shit like lean in and wave his eyebrows at you tapping on the monitor glass condescendingly asking QUESTION after QUESTION when you were trying to do stuff like focusing on writing your dissertation or important TPS reports for the boss. It was so annoying. It even made noises. [1]
I think it was appealing in a cartoony 90's kind of way for maybe 10 minutes for anyone who liked that kind of thing, but if you had to sit down and use this program for hours until you were done this character was the worst. Good thing you could turn it off, I remember a ton of people asking me how to do that back in the day.
To me, Clippy represents designers' obsession with a cloyingly sweet First-Time User Experience that makes the product unusable if you actually retain the user. I think he lives on in "let's make the settings menu a text conversation with a chat bot!," unskippable cut scenes in games, and other overly cute ideas.
If you had shit to do, Clippy was the digital equivalent of some annoying pest of a person throwing out random numbers when you're trying to count cash.
If that's not enough, he specifically creeped women out according to that article:
Generally, Atteberry’s character tested well in focus groups—the best of any assistant in some cases. Yet its massive eyes could be buggy. Some women in the cohorts deemed Clippy a man, and the constant male gaze creepy. “There were comments about how Clippy was leering,” says Roz Ho, who worked in product planning for the PowerPoint team then. When Ho raised that concern, she says the men in the room—everyone else, basically—couldn’t process it. “It really wasn’t about, like, these guys were bad guys, or anything. It was just they had a hard time picturing that feedback.”
Of all the reasons to criticize Clippy, the notion of it evoking a sense of the “constant male gaze” is… something.
Clippy didn’t have a gender, how could something like this possible be avoided? I’m asking with a bit of snark, but I’m genuinely open to a serious answer. I’m worried that the solution would just be an attempt at making the dialogue even more obtuse, or making the avatar overtly feminine.
> how could something like this possible be avoided?
Give up on trying to accommodate everyone.
> making the avatar overtly feminine
In the 90s, I spent plenty of time around the type of person who might see Clippy is a male predator, and they would certainly have had a problem with the assistant being feminine.
As a confident person with bad eye-contact tendencies I must admit I take a bit of personal offense at this, but, based on my opinions about taking offense: no action necessary.
>Timothy: "Don't Bah me! I want to know what you're up to."
>Nero: "This is ridiculous. I like eyes at a level. If you will only blather at me, Mister Goodwin will put you out. If you will take that chair, change your tone, and give me an acceptable reason why I should listen to you, I may listen!"
>Timothy: "I know about you. I know how you operate. If you want to hook Missus Altos for some change, that's her business. But you're not going to drag Miss Hinkley into ..."
>Nero: "Archie, Fritz will open the door."
>Timothy: "Get your hands off me! Get your paws off of me! Awk! Aah!"
Imagine Siri/Cortana, but 100x worse, constantly interrupting whatever you are doing. (For what it’s worth, I always disable these assistants the first thing too. But Clippy was worse.)
At least Clippy didn't rely all of your questions back to some server farm somewhere where those questions are used by whomever to build a online profile of you.
I remember being around 12 years old when I had Office as part of my first computer. Oddly, at that age and typing up reports, letters or anything else for school work it was nice to see Clippy right there tell me what he thought of what I was typing up. It was nice for him to teach me what I should do settings wise to get a nice document out of my printer for school. Being that young I wasn't likely to go and read everything about Office just to print out a school report (better off just hand writing it or typing it up on a typewriter). The closest thing I have to Clippy these days is the Doctor in Emacs who fills "tfc" hole I have some days.
The difference is that Clippy was designed to be helpful (and occasionally was), kinda fun to mess around with, only slightly patronizing, could be disabled, could be customized, and generally left the user feeling in control of their own experience and interactions.
Those "cute" wannabe-hip pseudo-hip error messages are the complete opposite. They show up only when you are already annoyed because something is broken, and they make the user feel disrespected. When I see an error message like that, it feels like someone is trying to appease me the way you might try to appease an angry kid with ice cream. They are an insulting attempt to pander to me in order to try to protect me from something I do not need protection from.
Because they knew that it would be too powerful, too ahead of its time. We all would have wept at the beauty and been unable to continue on in our meagre existences if Bob v2 came into being.
everyone named bob would have felt like shit from there on out knowing there was a bob v2 out there, something they would never be able to attain for themselves.
Am I tripping out or do I remember some demo video of microsoft bob which showed how you could shop for groceries online with it in the mid 90s? I swear I saw this when I was a kid cause it was kind of mind blowing at the time
I suspect with new AI chatbots we're getting close to the level of tech to be able to remake clippy and make him actually useful this time...
Things like "Hi Clippy, I wrote a draft of this brochure, but can you pad it out and send it out with a customized intro to all promising looking leads in salesforce?"
It's not clippy, but Microsoft has added "suggested styling" to Powerpoint, and I let it re-layout my pages, and the results are beautiful. It sees your page and suggests a layout, which you can choose to accept.
You know what feature I want? The ability to "upgrade" any text that matches some specific set of properties (eg. "Font size > 12, bold") and apply a particular style to it. People create all kinds of horrifying fucked up Word documents with DIY manual formatting, and cleaning it up can be a huge chore.
People don't seem to realize that Word (and LibreOffice Writer) is actually a pretty good document processing and typesetting program, for when you want more features than Markdown/Adoc/rST but you don't need the meticulous precise control of *Tex. But you need to use features like footers, styles, cross-references, etc.
Microsoft has also added "suggested phrasing", which prioritizes concision even when it removes deliberately inserted uncertainty. In some cases, following its suggestions wouldn't even have resulted in coherent sentences. For a sentence of the form "Do $X, unless $VAR is true." had the recommend replacement "Do $X, unless $VAR.".
> For a sentence of the form "Do $X, unless $VAR is true." had the recommend replacement "Do $X, unless $VAR.". //
Was your actual sentence "Do $activity, unless $condition is true." (with $activity as say 'print the annual report' and $condition as 'Steve has printed it')? I'm struggling to see how the result wasn't coherent. Something like "Do P&L, unless Wednesday" is terse, but not hard to parse; I must be missing something?
I tried to look back to find the exact example, but couldn't find anywhere that I had written it down. It was something where the $condition was a single word, referring to a boolean variable, but was not itself an adjective. By removing the "is true" clause, the clause was left without a verb, and without an antecedent.
At some point I found the clippy & friends spritesheets online and was trying to add it to blender, unfortunately (or fortunately) you couldn’t do UI animations without moving the mouse (or other trickery) so it ended up as a “it woulda been awesome” project. Not to mention the copyright issues.
I think those who fail to appreciate clippy, fail to appreciate that there is nothing like face to face collaboration. The natural interactions instead of relying on impersonal email/slack, the genuine curiosity to pop-up anytime without having to deal with location/timezone issues, the water-cooler-chat type spontaneity to find out "what are you trying to do" - these are essential towards achieving continuous improvement and productivity growth. That is why I think we should support clippy and return to office.
The web would be a much nicer place if instead of random popups Clippy pops up with “I noticed you bought a car recently? Here’s a 2020 Datsun you might like…”
Microsoft should license Clippy to all the adtech giants.
I remember fooling around with the Microsoft Assistant APIs of that era — there were a number of downloadable characters you could have on your desktop, and you could script various animations, gestures, prompts and tie it in to your programs.
It's shame those APIs are now retired and are no longer part of Windows, as having those assistants as front ends to proper ML/AI systems would be a fun coding experiment.
What was Microsoft thinking with this? They realized, or should have realized BOB was a bad idea, we weren't that dumb.
But then Clippy? So that when hardware was 10,000 times better, and software that much more refined, there would be a literal strongman/person who would emerge from your device and force you this direction or that?
And the name is now reused for Rust's package manager cargo's lint tool. I wonder how Rust was able to use the name clippy, I would have thought it were trademarked by Microsoft.
Cargo's clippy started as a third-party tool and got upstreamed later. It's entirely possible that it could be infringing on some trademark, but in that case it wouldn't be that much trouble to change it to "cargo vet" or something.
I couldn't stand Clippy. The sounds it made were obnoxious. But I switched to PowerPup and actually enjoyed having him there. His animations were cute.
i found it to be a mildly funny and innovative idea but also not very helpful and hence deactivated it after a few days. i also agree that the hatred always seemed rather self serving and overtly emotional.
>Fries and Linnett would test scores of similar characters as “wizards” for Bob. They’d do so with the help of two star Stanford researchers. Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves were an odd couple—Nass a computing savant liable to have a chunk of cream cheese on his tie, Reeves a polished film and TV buff—but they were of the same mind about media: People’s interactions with screens were “social and natural”—as if the machines were humans. During a two-year leave from Palo Alto, they visited Redmond almost weekly as consultants with Microsoft’s internal think tank.
I posted this recently about Cliff Nass and Clippy on the discussion about Bonzi Buddy:
DonHopkins on June 5, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Bonzi Buddy
Microsoft Agent and Microsoft Bob and Clippy were all based on a tragic misinterpretation of the theories of Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, and as much as those Microsoft products were mismanaged, mocked, maligned, and abused, his theories and work were actually quite interesting and still relevant, though tragically misunderstood. I saw him give a fascinating talk about his work at Ted Selker's "New Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop at IBM Almaden Labs in 1996.
>The theory behind this software came from work on social interfaces by Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information.
>Clifford Ivar Nass (April 3, 1958 – November 2, 2013) was a professor of communication at Stanford University, co-creator of The Media Equation theory, and a renowned authority on human-computer interaction (HCI). He was also known for his work on individual differences associated with media multitasking. Nass was the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford and held courtesy appointments in Computer Science, Education, Law, and Sociology. He was also affiliated with the programs in Symbolic Systems and Science, Technology, and Society.
g4tv.com-video4080: Why People Yell at Their Computer Monitors and Hate Microsoft's Clippy
>Alan Cooper (the "Father of Visual Basic") said: "Clippy was based on a really tragic misunderstanding of a truly profound bit of scientific research. At Stanford University, Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, two brilliant scientists, had done some pioneering work proving conclusively that human beings react to computers with the same set of emotional reactions that they use to react to other human beings. [...] The work of Nass and Reeves proved that when people talk to computers, when they hit the keyboard and move the mouse, the part of their brain that's being activated is the part that has that emotional reaction to people dealing with people. Here's where the great mistake was made. That's really good research up to that point. But then the great mistake was made, which was: well if people react to computers as though they're people, we have to put the faces of people on computers. Which in my opinion is exactly the incorrect reaction. If people are going to react to computers as though they're humans, the one thing you don't have to do is anthropomorphize them, because they're already using that part of the brain. Clippy was a program based on the research that Nass and Reeves did, and it was a tragic misinterpretation of their work."
Social science research influences computer product design
>STANFORD -- A new home computer product to be introduced with fanfare at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Saturday, Jan. 7, is based on research on human-computer interaction conducted at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information.
>"Microsoft's new Bob home computer program is an example of how formerly arcane knowledge about human behavior has become as relevant as computer science to the communication technology marketplace," said John Perry, director of CSLI. The 12- year-old Stanford center does research in the related fields of information, computing and cognition.
>"The interface between humans and computers is where the action in computers is now, and so research on how people think and behave is becoming hot stuff," Perry said.
>Two social scientists, Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, professors in the Communication Department, provided their theories and research results to Microsoft Corp.'s "social interface" program designers. The program's first product, called Bob, is to be introduced Saturday, Jan. 7 by Microsoft chairman and CEO Bill Gates at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Reeves and Nass are currently serving as consultants to Microsoft.
>Their research can be applied, however, to other forms of information technology, including voicemail and interactive television.
>"Nass' and Reeves' work considers to what extent people react to technology as if it were more real than it is," Perry said. "They have found that to a very considerable extent people treat their computers and other computer-driven technology in the same ways that they treat people - as if the computer possessed reason, feelings, etc. People also treat pictures on screens as real objects, rather than as representations of real objects. This is relevant to anyone who wants to design technology or content that is as effective as it can be," Perry said.
>This work can also be controversial, Nass said. For example, some women have complained about findings, in his and Reeves' experiments with computer voices, that people are prone to gender stereotyping in voice-based technologies. "Female voices are perceived as less effective evaluators and more nurturing than are male-voiced systems. Female voiced computers are perceived as better teachers of love and relationships and worse teachers of technical subjects than are male-voiced teaching systems," the two reported in CSLI's annual research report.
>"We are not supporting gender stereotyping but we are identifying something that people designing products should be sensitive about," Nass said. "It's an important finding also, because it says that you can't blame women for gender stereotyping because of the way they dress and behave. Here is a black box that doesn't dress or behave differently than men, and it still gets gender stereotyped." [...]
Computers as Social Actors. Clifford Nass. Professor. Stanford University. "New Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop, IBM Almaden Labs, 1996.
>Individual's interaction with technologies is fundamentally, emphasis on fundamentally, social and natural, and in a minute I'll define what I mean by social and natural. I can refer to in questions. Second point if you'll see is these responses are automatic and unconscious. Simply put, all of you in the audience will deny that you would do when you would see people like you that is experienced computer users do up here. The reason you'll deny it is because these are responses that you're not consciously aware of and that you couldn't control. So what do I mean by fundamentally social. What I mean is go to the social science section of the library and the argument of this talk is the people who know the most by far about human computer interaction or social science. Unfortunately, none of them know that. Little did they know that they had been spending all their time writing deeply about human computer interaction and just were not aware of it. [...]
>Phil Agre: This may be as big a question as Ken's, Cliff I found your presentation ethically troubling all the way down, I want to ....
>Clifford Clifford Nass: It's not my fault (laughs in the background)
>Phil Agre: No, I think it is. At least, it's my concern. Let me just try a scenario on you. In the literature you are talking about is a great deal of research on the conditions under which people are more likely to obey instructions. What do you think about imbedding those principles in user interfaces. Are you comfortable with that?
>Clifford Nass: Okay, I think I can give you a really short answer. It is critically important and socially valuable to know all the terrible ways that people can be manipulated. That is critically important that is not to say, nor if I advocated at all in this talk, that we necessarily should use those methods. The discovery that people can be manipulated is one of the most important social findings in the 20th century and I'm also delighted we know that. I'm also delighted that we know we should avoid it, that's good too. There is no ethical component to the discovery that these things exist, there is an ethical component in using them and I am not advocating which ones you use and which ones you don't. That's for the individual ..
>Ted Selker: Except, except when you are in your consulting role.
>Clifford Nass: Well but even there, I'll give you a really short anecdote: male characters are trusted more than female characters.
>Ted Selker: So the character in us, for example if I am designing a user interface I really want to focus and work on tasks and be oriented. Now if I've got this little guy over here, that's like disorienting me. I'm sorry guys, that's not really helping with my task. Now when is it appropriate to have an avatar helping me in a task, and that has to do when the task is generally social probably plus I'm sure we can learn about that.
>Clifford Nass: No, it's the same thing as sometimes when I want to know what the meaning of a word is, I look in the dictionary. Sometimes I go to the guys next door, not for reasons of speed but I feel like being social with the guy next door. Even though I may be working on a task I may just feel like it. Similarly social things should be there, social manifestations should be there when you feel like it. With that said, one lesson from Bob is the characters there where way over the top. They spent their life saying look at me I am a character, look at me I am a character, we don't like that in people and we certainly don't like in software either. So social presences that are available when we want them and not when you don't are the people we like the best and those are the people we should model.
Personally I will go to bat for Clippy and don’t think he deserves the derision.