Plenty of complaints about it during the beta process and no direct way to turn the Start Menu off. The same thing happened with the Windows 8 full screen Start Menu. This was something that should have been fixed during the beta testing but wasn’t. (Our editor in chief, Peter Deegan, was nominated for an award for his extensive coverage of Kill Clippy!) The option to turn it off didn’t work properly and it took considerable tinkering to kill the persistent little beggar. The biggest problem with Clippy was its persistence. Nothing could shift Microsoft from the Clippy course to disaster and derision. What did Microsoft do in face of this overwhelmingy negative response? Nothing. Anyone who used Word 97 beta for any length of time hated the damn thing. Not listening to customersĬlippy got really bad feedback all through the internal and external testing of Office 97. But it looked great in tightly controlled demos and generated sales – that’s all that mattered. But it looks great in demonstrations of new features.Ĭlippy was an annoyance in regular use, Microsoft knew that. Microsoft sometimes adds a feature that it knows will be of limited use to customers. It’s an example of a failing in Microsoft’s corporate culture. It’s not the only time that Microsoft has barged ahead with a bad idea – Clippy is just the most famous.Ĭlippy wasn’t ahead of it’s time … please. Microsoft knew Clippy was going to be unpopular before Office 97 went on sale, but they ignored all contrary voices – inside and outside the company. Microsoft’s revisionist history fails to mention that Clippy was an entirely avoidable disaster. We’re now told that Clippy was OK, “ We were just ahead of our time with the technology.” Talk about rewriting history!Ĭlippy was a disaster, hated by customers and a running joke even over 15 years later. The interview is part of Microsoft’s promotion of their new ‘bots’ or intelligence features in Cortana and available to developers for their own apps. Julie Larson-Green the Microsoft Office Chief Experience Officer reveals that she’s the one who unbent Clippy’s paperclip and trashed it. Anyone who used Office 97 knows that.īusiness Insider reports on comments by Microsoft on Clippy – the late and un-lamented feature of Office 97. It wasn’t their fault, it was us customers! According to this fiction, there was nothing wrong with Clippy but it was ‘ahead of it’s time’ and customers didn’t understand. The new emoji that are supposedly just for Microsoft Teams but can easily be used elsewhere.Microsoft tries to rewrite history on Clippy. I look forward to Microsoft’s promotion with a good German wheat beer or single-malt Scotch.īefore we examine this particularly strange marketing attempt, let’s get down to the important business. Perhaps next year will have a Microsoft promotion with Pickled Peppers Month?Īs a diabetic I shy away from chocolate and anyway Microsoft Office tends to drive me to drink. See below for the full list – it’s too bizarre to overlook. Just one of over 70 special labels for this month including (I kid you not) Bat Appreciation Month and Toilet Tank Repair Month. The excuse is that October is National Cookie Month. Why? Perhaps Office customers tend to binge cookies in frustration while trying to figure out the latest changes, bugs, buggy patches and other avoiding hassles in Microsoft 365 and MS Office? We’re told that the Oreo cookie is the “ultimate cookie for adults and Microsoft 365”. Oreo emoji in Word, PowerPoint and Outlook.(Sometimes it’s hard to write Microsoft Office news with a straight face – this is definitely one of those times.) On the practical side, we’ll show how to grab the two Oreo emoji (‘exclusive’ to Microsoft Teams) and use them in Word, PowerPoint, Outlook or anywhere else. Poor old Clippy has been dragged in as well. Microsoft Office and Oreos (the chocolate cookie) have combined for a marketing stunt with online events (sorry “snack breaks”), special packs, tchotchke and emoji. If you thought the modern world could not get any stranger, we’ve got bad news.
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