Eneris Solutions » Clippy! aka Agents

Microsoft BOB &  Herbie the love bug (beep-beep)

Have you ever heard of Microsoft Bob? No? Well, don’t think that just because you don’t know Bob, that you haven’t suffered because of him.

You’ve got to take yourself back to 1995, when GUI’s were relatively new (at least for the masses), - they presented this great graphical office metaphor. Overlapped windows that you can move around on you desk, just like files, and folders, etc. – cool stuff! So some very smart people asked themselves a question – how can we take this office metaphor to the next level, to make human computer interaction truely more natural and intuitive.

This great leap forward would be not just a flat desk, but a virtual 3d world. Ok, back in 1995 we couldn’t animate the movement yet but at least you could display the 3d world. And of course you need an assistant – a sort of virtual secretary - to help you, answer your questions, so you don't feel lonely. Ok, now you can ‘see’ the calendar on the wall, and the clock, and a real 3d desk with your folders, and you can intuitive and obviously understand the power of reflecting the real world into the virtual desktop world. So let’s invest a lot of money in developing the “NEXT” desktop… and we’ll name it, well Bob of course – huh? Yep, Bob.

Luckily I was not doing Bob. But I did get go to a Bob planning meeting because Bob needed multimedia. Of course, Bob was a much bigger and more important thing than Multimedia (you really have to go back to 1995 to understand this). So the Bob meeting had a huge table full of UI specialists, graphical designers, etc. Bob was ADVANCED RESEARCH! 

And the discussion went something like this ‘We are working on a talking dog’. ‘People respond to this with 82% accuracy’, ‘Several characters have been tested, including the Martini Glass, and a Paper Clip, and a Car’. Ok. This all seemed to me to be an incredible waste of resources given that multimedia was chronically understaffed at the time (like 1/4 of the team size compared to Bob). Anyways, for some reason they had excluded the talking car as an office assistant. Having been quiet the entire meeting, I finally decided I had to say something, so as not to be left out of the conversation “But I wanted the little car”. 

And I got a very academic sounding answer from a nice looking (whose name was M-something) project manager – “Everybody knows that cars can’t talk”. What? I responded quickly "Huh? Why can Dogs talk but not Cars?". The answer I got to this question was very academic (psychological) - it went something like this - People don't generally believe that they can talk and interact with cars, but they do talk and interact with dogs. I guess they had done a lot of reserach on this. Being argumentative, I had to ask "What about the paperclip and Martini? How the heck do they 'talk'". After saying this I got one of those stupid looks which means 'stop holding up the meeting with stupid questions'.... along with the answer "they are more like cartoon characters and because we know they can't talk, then it is ok if they do talk"..... Or something like that.  I hate to be the troublemaker (or actually that's not true), so I just left it at that. Maybe some more research is needed into this agent business. Anyways, I left the meeting thinking, does herbie really 'communicate', i guess he just sort of goes beep-beep, but I know a lot of people who talk to their cars (and some that hear them talking back). Eventually I was able to push the image of all those highly paid persons working on talking paper clips out of my mind, and get back to the unimportant task of trying to make the video of a persons lips stay synchronized with the audio tracks of the same.

  -- Hopefully I didn’t complain too much at the meeting, might have been bad for my career (there were some high level folks behind this project. I couldn't help thinking that this whole Bob and Agent thing was a bit silly. Anyways, to make a long story short, Bob was a flop, and everyone rejoiced. But wait, don’t think that you get out that easy. In an attempt to show that their logic was not completely flawed -  Bob clung to its life in the form of the MS Agents – and was reincarnated as  The Talking Paperclip Office Assistant! In my mind the paper clip in Office was an attempt to save face, to show that the millions invested in psychological research, phds, etc., by very smart people, etc, couldn't have been wrong.

And thank goodness we never had time in the multimedia group to actually make the paperclip talk (ok we got the 'wink-wink' sound to work!). Just image if the paper-clip had actually talked out loud, "Looks like you are writing a letter..."

Actually, I think agent interfaces still might be useful someday in the future, and I am doing some research on the subject. What is the killer-feature for agents that will drive their acceptance?? Check out some of the links at the bottom for more information.

        Good arcticle with interveiw:   http://www.appscout.com/2007/02/to_kill_a_paperclip.php

        A few comments: http://usin.wordpress.com/category/usability/

        Not really: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/11/technology/11ADCO.html?ex=1212811200&en=5623fd953162d6db&ei=5070

        Practical: http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/articles/features/0,1000002000,39289692,00.htm

        1997-2007 The demise: http://www.chipchick.com/2007/02/iconic_microsoft_character_passes_away_and_no_one_notices.html

        From 2001: Reports of Clippys demise: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-267631.html

        Funny youtube about trashing paperclip: http://www.jibjab.com/view/91532

        Paper clip image borrowed from this (cool) site: http://xenon.stanford.edu/~lswartz/paperclip/

        How to get rid of the paper clip: http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article08-100

        Microsoft agent lives:  http://www.microsoft.com/msagent/using/userinterface.aspx

(c) 2008 Thomas O'Rourke