The horrible history of Clippy
Published: 27 Sep 2007 17:38 BST
"It's probably the most annoying innovation Microsoft has added to Office in years," was one of the more polite descriptions of Microsoft's animated Office assistant, which first reared its two-dimensional head back in Office 97.
But this week Novell distinguished software engineer Michael Meeks resurrected the ghost of Clippy when he used the office assistant to illustrate what he sees as the chief benefit of open source over proprietary code.
"Free software gives you the freedom that, even if you are a one-man shop, you can have it fixed if it is annoying you enough. The example I like to give is "Clippy" — remember? — that whipping boy of journalists. You couldn't turn it off and it came on and you had to talk to it before you came on," said Meeks, in an interview with ZDNet.co.uk.
"Now turning Clippy off, in my estimation, is a single line of code change. With Microsoft you just couldn't do that. You couldn't get into their software, find the piece of code and just fix it. If you think about the software cost of some catastrophic blunder, often it would be way cheaper if you could just get in and fix it. I think that is a huge benefit of the free-software industry," Meeks said.
Word 2007
If you're ready to let go of old habits from previous versions of Word and want to make sleeker-looking documents, Word 2007 is worth the upgrade. However, less expensive alternatives deliver its core features without the clutter. [07 Feb 2007]
Bury Clippy forever
If you thought Clippy was dead, think again. We'll show you how to make him R.I.P. -- and how to tweak the help system. [08 Jul 2002]
Born again: Clippy returns to haunt Office XP
Rumours of Clippy's demise were premature, it seems. Now, just when you thought it was safe to return to Office, Microsoft resurrects the infamous paperclip [01 Jun 2001]
Microsoft kills off Clippy
That annoying paperclip is finally binned as Microsoft admits the feature is hideously unattractive [12 Apr 2001]
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