They had a couple of flash animations (the contemporary equivalent of a viral video), recorded here for posterity. Clippy was voiced by Gilbert Gottfried
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu_Pzuwy-JY
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82KZG3Zy8xU
Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAsV6_AawVw
Remains of microsite here: https://web.archive.org/web/20031009044305/http://www.micros...
There was also a downloadable blues-type song which was titled 'it looks like you're writing a letter', I can't find it anywhere now but it was pretty good
edit: found the song! its at 1:01:35 in this video: https://youtu.be/8bhjNvSSuLM?t=3690
Compared with the Windows 95 video guide with Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry, you can really feel the different era of both Microsoft and maybe even social climate between them.
> flash animations (the contemporary equivalent of a viral video)
Heh. It's kind of hard to boil down what flash animations really were in essence anymore, isn't it? Clearly it's obsolete now, but something about limitations really does breed innovation.
It has deep nostalgia to a generation of computer users who are non-technical. People that were annoyed by it were either power users who wanted the machine to get out of their way, or learners who didn’t find it helpful.
I think in this case it would have worked much better and simultaneously validated earlier failed ideas. They would be viewed as ahead of their time, not like wrong futures.
Imagine the Microsoft press conference moment where clippy pops up and ACTUALLY HELPS YOU. I’d probably cry a little.
Another thing that came as a response to General Magic: Java. Java was a response to General Magic's Telescript [2].
So Clippy and Java were both inspired by the same product!
Watch the video [3] for an important piece of history!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic#Magic_Cap
In general, cutesy UIs are fun only the very first time you use them. But they’re a liability in the long term because once the novelty of the cuteness wears off, you risk really annoying your users, especially in high-stress scenarios.
Expanding on that: Clippy is endearing now because it hasn't annoyed anyone for a decade+, but it was a real nuisance — difficult to disable and not nearly useful enough to justify its incessant interrupting.
Avoid cutesy UIs.
I see a ton of "battle of superheroes" kinds of apps that try to demonstrate cool stuff, like deploying distributed applications over multiple clouds/k8s distributions, using serverless, Istio, and who knows what. But I just can't get over the fact that such tutorials are not made for me, as I've not watched any superhero movie since I was ~10 years old.
It's when style interferes with the functionality, that people start to get annoyed. But that applies to any aspect really: Animations, Minimalism / Skeuomorphism, Simplicity / Complexity...
Many apps successfully introduce cuteness through iconography and illustrations. Eg. Duolingo, Bear Notes, TunnelBear. Also look at Panic who have a (very mild) playful aesthetic in their power-user development tools: https://nova.app
Microsoft Comic Chat[1] was their take on how IRC should look like. It was quite popular for a short time and a bit annoying for users with other IRC clients. MS Comic Chat user sessions would send public messages upon joining channels: "# Appears as ANNA".
The biggest problem, as he points out, was that it was a bit too simplistic. Anyone who was anywhere near to being a power user with work to get done was mostly going to be frustrated by it.
It was cute - even delightful - to me at first, then quickly just got in the way. To my mind, two things which could make such an idea more successful would be 1) making it easier to deactivate, and 2) having a more robust 'advanced' mode which points you to actual documentation, articles and support forums and other than that leaves you alone. I don't think the tech for that second part was possible back then (especially parsing natural language inquiries), but it is now.
The characters I ended up using most were the little dog and the bouncing ball. I didn't mind Clippy, but after seeing how others reacted to him I didn't want people to know that. The animations were great for all of them regardless, there was clearly a lot of talent deployed there. Unfortunately that has almost no connection to usefulness.
I remember enjoying the animations for the different characters. I think you could click on the clips /dog/ globe and trigger an random animations. Maybe a slow day at work.
I don’t recall clippy being useful, but I wasn’t a heavy word user.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CTgYYqZBoP2/?utm_source=ig_web_c...
I loved it so much that in 2005 for my CompSci final project I created a search assistant, using the agent builder tool, C# and the Google API.
I think it should come back as a personal AI agent.
