No one here is saying that Microsoft was good, which seems to underlie your insistence on Clippy being so horrible - they're saying that a mistake like this one wasn't born from anti-user sentiment. Microsoft had engaged in plenty of anti-consumer action by then, but Clippy wasn't an example of it - its inclusion was misguided because the software industry was still in the exploratory phase in terms of UX, and some designers thought that putting silly faces and characters on things would make computers easier to learn and use in the rapidly-expanding market. Which is why you also see less annoying forms of character images pop up in some other Microsoft software of the day, acting as flashier textboxes.
They didn't purposefully waste CPU time by disregarding good software engineering practices (like what's happening everywhere now), they just misplaced a part of the performance budget to something that wasn't very useful. They didn't integrate Clippy as an essential part of the Microsoft experience, making it uplink your actions to Microsoft (which could have been done by then) or making Windows into the "Clippy OS". It was just an interactive help pop-up. If you didn't want it, you could have unchecked it from the very first version's install dialogue, and it would never appear anywhere. You could disable it afterwards. After a short run, Microsoft admitted their mistake and removed this feature for good, even making fun of it in a few Flash shorts and games. Nothing from this list even remotely approaches what Microsoft does today, and they will never return to the already-low-bar that was there 20 years ago.
No, it obviously doesn't underlie their criticism ... and that claim is ad hominem.
I think there are numerous reasons why Clippy is a poor choice for a mascot, and your correspondent presented some of those reasons.
I realize they also brought up points about why they thought this was bad. The rest of my comment was spent replying to those points.
> I did make an assumption of why they were arguing against it in such strong terms
Yes, exactly.
"a personal insult"
Maybe learn what the term actually means.
Or dare i say…ad clippynem?
Now nothing is done even remotely to try and help the customer. Every feature and every stupid “nudge” is done with pure malice, as the thinnest possible pretext to extract more information, more ad revenue, etc. from the user.
Clippy sucked, it would be nice if it still represented the worst kind of corporate shenanigans, but now it’s benign and naive compared to the evil rapaciousness arrayed against us by virtually all modern software.
It's not about data or technology at all. It's about property rights. User-centric computers (ideally) don't do anything their users don't want them to do. Business-centric computers don't care about what the user wants; they serve the interests of business (either the manufacturer or the user's employer).
I didn't care for it, but it was easy to turn off.
May everyone who makes such dialogues be afflicted with severe depression and be forced to ruminate at night about how empty they feel despite their "good" job and high salary.
With the intention of helping us... Today, it's done with the intention of changing us, to be more profitable to our digital masters. The idea is that if Clippy was bad, what's happening now is way worse. Clippy is a significant improvement over the modern setting.
This sort of thinking sends us straight onto a slippery slope. If you asked any of these trillion-dollar companies why they feel the need to exploit our data, they would insist it is all for our benefit, to provide better recommendations and personalize our experience, and other such nonsense. It is much the same logic that was used to justify Clippy's wasteful behavior at the time.
The fact is that these trillion-dollar companies now and Clippy then were exploiting our resources (data now, CPU then) to push features down our throat that they decided were "beneficial" or "helpful" for us.
The only redeeming feature of Clippy was that you could disable it easily. Can't do that with the trillion dollar companies.
Louis Rossmann talks about it in his original Clippy talk: the issue isn't going to the good old days[1], but to spook current set of software rulers to do better. Think of it as an Anonymous mask for the Right to Repair.
Louis is great - the right to repair movement is much bigger, though. Louis made the movemoent more widespread, of course with his channel, but right to repair kind of can even be found when GPL was founded. Of course the GPL focused more on software and not on hardware, but to me these are basically almost identical fights / causes. It is the question as to who owns/controls something.
Right to repair (RtR) needs a vocal majority to really move the needle. Politicians hate when people unite around things that they work against. Namely unchecked corps doing whatever they want and donating them money.
When are anti-monopoly judges going to split GOOG and MSFT?
EDIT: It just occurred to me this is why `cargo clippy` is named as such. Crazy that I never questioned that.
It may not seem that way now, since even visiting a simple blog page consumes far more processing power than an entire Windows boot sequence from that era and no one thinks twice about it. But when Clippy was introduced, processors were slow, resources were tight and squandering CPU time for no good reason brought it close to being considered outright harmful.
It was, and we rightfully called software doing it "spyware", or more generally "malware". Today we call this "telemetry" and somehow it became standard practice in software engineering.
This is a difference of degree, not of kind.
But when Clippy was forced upon us then it definitely felt user hostile. The threshold for what computer users (there were fewer of them) would call user hostile was lower then. The only redeeming feature of Clippy was that you could disable it easily. But it was still user hostile when it ran.
So yes, coming from the context of those old days, Clippy was both annoying and user hostile then.
It's a pet peeve of mine that the norms have changed so much so that such user hostile UX is considered "annoying" at most today when the right term for it IMO is "user hostile".