Certain Microsoft veterans seemed to agree: When asked how he felt about Clippy, Word 1.0 author Richard Brodie replied, "Like a cat feels about a bath." Simonyi expressed a similar sentiment.

Drop-Down Shenanigans

In Word 2000 for Windows, Microsoft included a questionable interface design change. Called "personalized menus," the feature ideally made Word easier to use (key word: "ideally"). It worked by keeping track of your most-used menu items and showing only those by default, while hiding the rest of your drop-down menu choices. To see those, one had to click on a tiny arrow to expand the drop-down menu.

Thankfully, users could , but figuring out how was not as obvious as it should have been. Clippy should have told us.

Features Overload