09.13.10
Microsoft’s Clippy Voted Most Hated Mascot Ever
Vigor’s evil assistant! (licensing details at the bottom)
Summary: News about Clippy and about Apple’s ‘antennagate’, which are said to have caused damage to Microsoft’s and Apple’s reputation, respectively
Thomas Claburn has this new gallery of “Top 10 Most Hated Tech Mascots Ever”. At number 1: “Clippy”
Introduced to the world in Microsoft Office ’97 for Windows, Clippit the Office Assistant, AKA Clippy, has been declared “one of the worst software design blunders in the annals of computing,” by Smithsonian Magazine. And similar sentiments have been expressed in countless other publications, blogs, and videos. Everyone hates Clippy, and such unanimity is rare online. Really, we should be thankful for Clippy as the source of endless mirth.
Here is another new poll of interest (regarding Apple):
About 20 percent of mobile phone users said the antenna problem on the iPhone 4 caused them not to buy one. But more than 60 percent said it was because of Apple’s exclusive carrier contract with AT&T–and that they couldn’t use carrier Verizon Wireless–that they didn’t want the handset.
Apple is believed to have lost executives due to the antenna problem. Apple has been good at taking BSD-licensed code, hacking on it (for proprietary products), and then mass-marketing it using billions of dollars in spendings on brand names. ‘Antennagate’ helped show that despite all the hype, Apple’s products fail just like everything else. █
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