Microsoft solicits Clippy comeback – later reveals it had already decided to bring back the peppy paperclip Microsoft has turned to the "wisdom" of the Instagram crowd and Twitter to seek permission to restore its much-reviled Office Assistant "Clippy" to a place of prominence. The software giant on Wednesday challenged Instagram users to like the post depicted below a mere 200,000 times and it would then "replace the paperclip …
But somehow it gets you into the top jobs:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-bullingdon-club-appointment-b1885184.html
"Boris Johnson’s government is under fire after one of the prime minister’s university friends – a former Bullingdon Club member – was handed a role on Whitehall’s sleaze watchdog.
Ewen Fergusson, a member of Oxford’s infamous dining club at the same time as the prime minister, has been named as one of two new members for the committee on standards in public life."
Not only do Mshaft provide us with 'features' we have little desire or need for, they make it increasingly difficult to negate or remove said features by moving everything around, changing the name or description of things etc.
Since 10 made it's appearance I have been steadily finding ways to disable and remove clutter, now notwithstanding 'features' that appear after updates, I almost have 10 how I want it.
So now I have 11 to look forward to as a new challenge, except I won't, my new challenge is likely to be linux.
This nonsense is up there with moving the Outlook calendar buttons way over to the right of Outlook, miles away from the relevant appointment data your eyes need to know which button you want. How do they qualify "what users want"? It's clear, apparently. A mere 20k of Twitter upvotes and they change the experience of the entire customer base. Wow. The contempt for user experience is palpable.
Several years ago, I was working as a software developer for a large multi-national company. A project was spawned somewhere at mid-management level to overhaul a largely automated process and make it more manual (despite the opposite being done 2 or 3 years ago, saving the company hundreds of thousands of pounds in labour costs). The middle manager championing this change declared that "it was what the customer wanted".
I went straight for the throat. I asked if he'd done any customer surveys. He hadn't. I asked if he'd gone through the analytics data and found any trends. He hadn't. I asked if he'd spoken to any customers, or even to customer services who were in pretty close contact with customers. Of course, he hadn't. So I then asked, very forcefully, how he had come to the conclusion that this was what the customer wanted. It turned out that, it was just what he thought the customer wanted. As a point of note, the manager in question had something of a reputation for screwing up every project he touched, yet he still managed to stick around.
Though the project never made any more headway in the year or so before I left, it was still alive when I departed.
The feeling of sheer, petrifying horror that pervades my being when I see that be-eyebrow'd paper clip can only be imagined by the people who weren't there at the time.
This is like realising that you can't kill Dracula, or that the Zombies will _always_ come back... Or that Aunt Alice will bring round her lemon drizzle cake.. again... (twitch)
Those 127k upticks are like 127k stabs to my very being.
I'm shivering now, I have the sweats... I don't know if I'll be able to continue working today this has simply....
the horror,
just,
the horror
With a pair of wire cutters.
And a Dremmel tool.
And an arc welder.
Repeatedly.
With extreme prejudice.
And keep it up until the corpse is too dismembered to reanimate.
And if anyone tries to reassemble it, give Clippy some company in the disection party.
Clippy is the SCO of productivity.
Well, if they are focusing on cruft that does nothing to help anyone then we all know why Win10 is such a bag of spanners.
Surely though they replaced clippy with Cortana, before removing both as nobody was interested.
How about they start other similar requests for things that might actually matter, Oh, I don't know, off the top of my head.
Removing the ribbon and going back to proper menus
Removing the start menu and going back to proper user structured menus -- ie how my brain is wired, not long alphanumeric lists of all the crap on my computer.
Having a border between windows so you can see where they start and stop, rather than having to play guess the pixel to stretch a window
Dumping the pointless store
Dumping SecureBoot, forced updates and telemetry - its my PC to run what I want on and you can keep your nose out.
Dumping all the force fed advertising / pointless crapware - I don't want edge trying to become my browser from the start menu, or some stupid game that I never asked for. If you have to make something hard to remove, then you already know that people don't want it.
Making the search box go to my preferred browser search page as configured in the OS, not hard wired to some forced Microsoft one.
Hint - if you make it good, then we will use it. If you try and force it down our throats then I can guaranteed that we can be more stubborn than you.
Just that, "Noooooooooooooooo", please God, noooooooooooooooo.
I used to have nightmares about how to get rid of clippy from my daily grind, sorry life affirming work, of 'You seem to be writing a document of some sort would you like me to completely screw it up for you?' Because, and no offence to any USAfolk reading this, I'm English / British, so don't want Microsoft's version of USA spelling, USA formatting or USA grammar.
So just:
Noooooooooooooooo!
Realising that my tinfoil had really needs refurbishing.
Some of them have been working in Office because when I open a template document, and add couple of lines and save it as a new file, EVERY TIME I OPEN THE TEMPLATE IT WELCOMES ME BACK....fuck! why?
And yesterday, the fucking weather app in the task bar. Surely the fucking developers would have made the installer check and see if there was ANY OTHER CRAP enabled BEFORE TURNING IT ON.
So sad that they are basing their decisions on what Twatter and Instagram (aka Farcebook) users want instead of asking real people. "Oh, yes, let's have a new icon that we can send to all of our imaginary friends who are only our friends because they are as stupid as we are!". I genuinely dispair for the future of humanity unless "social media" is banned from influencing important matters like the abomination that was Clippy. Let her (or him) RIP.
it's amusing that an MS troll has apprently gone through these comments and downvoted any of them that poke at Microsoft (which, yeah, that's pretty much all of them). They all have exactly 1 downvote. Must be somebody from the original Clippy dev team still reading El Reg.
Conversely I have upvoted more posts on this story than in any other I have seen on the Register (including yours, dear Mr Pirate Dave). But only because you pointed this out first.
I wonder whether the Register's Sysadmin team could find out who it was and have a quiet word with them???
Well, after 16 hours my post has been thumbed down, but another post which is, at the moment, 11 hours old has not been thumbed down. I assume therefore that the person is checking new posts and downvoting new ones on a daily basis. Let's see if (s)he logs in over the weekend.
Troll icon 'coz that appears to be what we are dealing with.
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