At least those things felt like a sincere attempt to move HCI forward. Perhaps not very well tested to understand how all the parts work together, but at least sincere. MS' Copilot brand is a broken solution in search of a problem.
It's almost like the kind of trap a lot of solo devs get into where they build a thing that is interesting to them but then can't find anyone else interested. But at least the solo devs built something that worked for themselves. I can't imagine anyone at MS eating their own dog food on this stuff.
At a company like MS, that shouldn't happen. They're supposed to have the resources to understand what their customers want. But we've seen this trend for the last 15 years. Companies like MS, Meta, Google, don't want to engage and collaborate with the customer. They want to push ideas down and be celebrated for their design brilliance. They don't even really A/B test this stuff anymore. The inmates are running the asylum.
It wasn't even ten years ago when I was participating in user studies as a developer at MS. And it was the real deal: we had a bunch of people, specifically selected to give a diverse cross-cut of the user base (so varying backgrounds, experience level etc), sit down and try to do some simple tasks with our product, while devs and PMs watched over a camera. And, crucially, you couldn't ask questions or provide guidance during that time - only after they were done. That was incredibly informative, much more so than any telemetry I've seen before or after, and I wish that was the norm in all companies; but, in any case, Microsoft definitely had both the resources and the inclination to do that.
The problem is that no amount of studies or A/B testing is going to change a political decision inside the company. And with AI, I'm convinced that for all the big players it is political at this point simply because all the execs have bet so much money on it. If they can't make it work, we're talking about literally billions of dollars of responsibility. Hence these desperate attempts to shove it everywhere in hopes that something somewhere would work well enough, if not to recoup the investment, then at least to postpone the moment it all comes crashing down.
The big problem I see now is that, when this bubble pops, there won't be any blood in the streets for the executive class. We truly live in a two class system where people like Nadela, Musk, Theil, and Altman and the slew of their enablers will never see any personal consequences for the havoc they have worked.
People are crying out for an intelligent Clippy to help them through the day. (Or maybe that little dog they used for a while, though don't know its name)
Was the dog ever the default? There were like 10 or so appearances you could change clippy to and the dog was one of them but clippy was the default so is the one people remember
Just looked it up and the dog was named "Rover" (another classy name from Microsoft). Rover was an option when introduced in "Microsoft Bob", but then later became the default search companion in XP's file search.
Also, we have Rover to blame for Comic Sans:
> Microsoft graphic designer Vincent Connare designed the typeface Comic Sans when he noticed that Rover's speech was displayed in Times New Roman, which he felt was inappropriate for a cartoon dog.
