That's one of the lessons of the Internet. But not all software developers have the luxury of starting from scratch. For old-school monolithic applications, such as Microsoft Office, usability has been a career struggle. As perhaps the most widely used suite of business applications in the world, from one of the wealthiest software developers in the world, one might think that Microsoft Office should be the poster child for software usability. With millions of users booting up to Office ever day, Microsoft's attempts to make it friendlier have hardly gone unnoticed.
People have strong emotions about that smug little avatar.
Clippy, implemented as an ActiveX control starting with Office 2000, was an interesting experiment with intelligent agent technology that was supposed to help make Microsoft Office friendlier and easier to use, but mostly, it was just annoying. Clippy tended to pop up too often to lend its cheery disposition to what were likely frustrating end-user situations. With Office XP, Microsoft is hyping the new usability features, and downplaying the old. Despite the rumors about Clippy's death, Clippy is still very much a part of Office, and is installed by default, but it won't pop up automatically by default as it has done since its birth in Office 97. An uncharacteristically playful Microsoft press release on Clippy's demotion points out the two new usability features of Office XP, Smart Tags and Task Panes, and makes Office XP sound like an entirely new beast.