Greg Stigers writes:
>I remember that our top-flight support group changed their policy to no
>longer allow we mere developers access to the CDs, and the guy who upgraded
>us to Office 97 had * no idea * what I had to do to change agents (they are
>top flight - and consult regularly with Mordac). So I edited my registry to
>use the logo agent. At the Office 97 seminar, this agent was introduced with
>"and for those of you with no personality whatsoever", which got a big
>laugh. I have no idea why. But I can understand loathing clippit.
Office 98 (for the Mac) allows disabling the agent very easily, so I
guess Microsoft got the message.
<rant>
Actually, I mind the agent a lot less than I mind the "helpful" automated
correction features. Trying to type a sentence with an uncapitalized word
at the beginning is absolutely impossible, and I often need to do that
when writing documentation. Also, woe to you if your TLA is in
Microsoft's list of misspellings for common English words: you'll never
be able to type it unless you disable autocorrection. (Adding it to the
spelling dictionary, which seems like the obvious thing to do, doesn't
work.) And good luck figuring out how to disable autocorrection, because
it's not called that in the UI even though it's called that in the
marketing literature and packaging. And just try typing a plain document
with Roman numerals in front of the paragraph headings. No, Microsoft, I
do *not* want to create an outline!
I do mind that the agent asks me if I want help typing a letter every
time I begin "Dear <something>. First, no I don't want any help, and a
really clever agent -- in fact, even a moderately stupid one -- would
have figured that out the third or fourth time I told it "no." Second,
the only help I might ever want is help it's too late for: help setting
up the formatting, which is practically all done by the time I get to
"Dear."
A news article in the journal _Science_ (27 February 1998) gushingly
described Microsoft's intensive research efforts and proudly proclaimed
Clippit as the the result. This article prompted several annoyed replies,
one of which is worth quoting:
The article on innovative research at Microsoft, featuring the
Office Assistant as an example, did not mention how intensely
annoying these gimmicks can be. I now squander substantial time
and ingenuity trying to trick my "smart" new word processor into
doing things my way, after it has guessed (usually incorrectly)
what I am attempting to do and is trying to constrain me to some
preconceived format. Are there really people who want this kind
of "help?" Perhaps so, but even if a majority of the 100 million
hapless users [Microsoft chief scientist] Nathan Myhrvold is
bombarding with new ideas welcome the manipulative assistance of
Paper Clip Man and his friends, there must also be tens of
millions of us out there who would much prefer just to muddle
through on our own. Suggestion to frustrated users: disable as
many automatic formatting functions as you can (and please let
me know how to kill them all in Word 97 if you can figure it
out; I still haven't). Suggestion to the mathematical minds
of Microsoft: play with Beyesian statistics all you like, but
when you incorporate the results into commercial software, make
it easy to turn them completely off!
-- W. B. Wood, University of Colorado
Another reader, late of Xerox PARC, notes that the "research" required
for this particular achievement was to read any of the numerous papers
that appeared in the early 1980s analyzing and implementing this
technology.
Not to mention well before that: "Are you trying to somehow deal with the
snake?" At least Adventure's wizard usually gave hints that were relevant
to the task at hand.
</rant>
-- Bruce
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