From Clippy to the Virgin Mary
p2pnet news view | Cool:- Remember Clippy, Microsoft’s weird, animated thingy that looked more like an anorexic worm with grotesquely swollen eyes than the paperclip it was supposed to be?
It caught Harry McCracken’s eye and launched him on a hilarious, and highly revealing, post on similarly bizarre Microsoft creations, all of which must have earned lotsa happy patent lawyers lotsa bucks.
For example item five, the ‘Intelligent User Assistance Facility,’ was filed in 1996, he says in Technologizer’s 15-part The Secret Origins of Clippy: Microsoft’s Bizarre Animated Character Patents.
“Call this the Clippy patent – the one that’s specifically about the infamous Office Assistant introduced in Office 97,” he says, going on »»»
For most of us, the Office Assistant is synonymous with the talking paperclip character, but you could actually choose between multiple helpers. Including William Shakespeare or an unreasonable facsimile thereof (shown in a fuzzy patent drawing). ‘Will’ is offering to help the user perform regression analysis here – I would have thought it intuitively obvious that anyone who knows what regression analysis is probably doesn’t want an animated version of the Bard of Avon getting involved in the process.
And if that doesn’t do it for you, how about Computer Interface for Illiterate and Near-Illiterate Users, the final example filed as recently as 2006 after Microsoft had obviously developed a clearer picture of the people using its product?
It, “pitches on-screen assistants as an interface for people who can’t read or write,” says McCracken. And No, Microsoft hasn’t patented the Virgin Mary. He adds »»»
The garb of the lady shown here is explained by the fact that the patent is the result of work by researchers in India; the parent says that the assistant could also be a dog, an elephant, or an airplane. It’s scary to think that the idea behind Bob and Clippy hasn’t completely fizzled out, but look on the bright side – if you’re reading this story, Microsoft isn’t going to try and get you to use any product based on this patent.
If you’re all patented out by now, “I understand,” he says, adding, “If not, here are a few more galleries of patent drawings – from the historic to the utterly mysterious,” to wit:
Now you know. 
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January 4th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Ill stick with the dialogs thankx
What about a Stripper Assistant? Ive always wanted one of them XP