BonziBuddy was free, so there seemed to be no harm in downloading it. This meant that anyone from eight year olds to their grandmothers could download the 'cute purple monkey' and play with it just for fun.

Looking back, sure it didn't make much sense to create a purple ape assistant from whole cloth, but perhaps Bonzi's biggest sin (so far in the story, anyway), was reskinning Microsoft's bad decisions.īonziBuddy may have essentially been a worse version of Clippy, but it had one thing going for it that Clippy didn't have: It wasn't tied to office software. While any developer could include Peedy in their programs, only Bonzi had their trademark monkey.

The company created their own cartoon character that was somehow sillier than a talking green parrot: a talking purple monkey. Third-party developer BONZI Software used Peedy as the first version of its standalone helper program 'BonziBUDDY.' Microsoft had intended these assistants to be bundled with other programs, but Bonzi's assistant was designed to help with everything. It would sit on your desktop all the time, talk to you every once in a while, and you could ask it to do things like.well, frankly, it wasn't that useful, but it sure was fun to hear it talk.Īfter a couple iterations of the program, Bonzi decided that they didn't want to just use the generic character that anyone could use. While Microsoft never used any of its generic characters internally, Peedy the Parrot would find a home outside the company. Microsoft also created a separate character based on the help icon to walk you through Windows XP's installation process. The Microsoft Office team decided to make their own character when they created Clippy, rather than use one of the defaults. Microsoft Agent allowed third-party developers to add their own assistants to their applications. These assistants could talk, answer voice commands, and perform actions on a user's behalf. The company even created four default characters that developers could choose from: Merlin the Wizard, Robby the Robot, Genie the Genie, and Peedy the Parrot. Agent itself was derived from code that was first introduced in Microsoft Bob (to give you an idea of how deep this bad idea rabbit hole goes). It didn't exactly work.Ĭlippy was built on a technology called Microsoft Agent. In Microsoft's collective mind, this meant they should start putting faces and voices on their screens, so people would enjoy using their computer more. Microsoft designed this assistant feature after 'tragically misunderstanding' a Stanford University study that observed humans emotionally respond to computers the same way they respond to people.

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