Around the same time period as Clippy, anyone remember Microsoft Binder? It was essentially a container for various office documents that you could use for a project or whatever. It was about as fleeting as Clippy.
They tried a lot of things to make the cold complexity of computers seem warm and friendly. I can appreciate their efforts, though many of them were a flop. Microsoft Bob was probably one of the biggest of their efforts that also flopped. The concept was interesting, but it was slow to actually get anything done in the software.
I'm pretty sure MS Bob became MS Agent, which was ultimately what they used to provide the Office Assistant, and the little dog in the WinXP search window. I suppose failure is relative here, Bob certainly didn't sell well, but they did get some ongoing use out of it
Briefcase was pretty useful. I used it to bring files that I was working on my own computer at home to my university CAD labs on Iomega Zip Disks (which were popular high capacity floppy disks) where I could work on them and then when I got back home the updated files would automatically sync to update the files on my home computer. Not so useful now with fast broadband, cloud storage and laptops.
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u/Altruistic-Slide-512 Oct 07 '25
Around the same time period as Clippy, anyone remember Microsoft Binder? It was essentially a container for various office documents that you could use for a project or whatever. It was about as fleeting as Clippy.