Years later, the Duke MBA eventually known as Melinda Gates would oversee the work of Fries and others on a much-maligned software project.
On her first day, Fries shared an orientation room with Melinda French. Four buildings surrounded “Lake Bill” at the HQ that would transform a small farming town 15 miles east of Seattle into a big-tech hub. In 1987, just over a decade after Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft, she started in Redmond. The “black sheep” in a family of engineers, Fries graduated with degrees in business and psych from the University of Washington. She wasn’t what former employees describe as a typical Microsoftie at the time: a Birkenstocked or button-downed developer with a Y chromosome. Sometimes, they’d tear up.įries didn’t want people to feel stupid using computers. “They’d be afraid to even move the mouse,” recalls Fries. Even the people closest to the geeks actually building the machines feared the technology. Only about 15 percent of households owned a personal computer, or PC. Managers and developers eyed subjects like lab investigators from behind the glass, observing their every cursor move. Back then, the company still leaned on friends and family as guinea pigs for its products. The wife of a colleague had offered to test Microsoft Publisher, the desktop application that debuted in 1991. In one of the company’s Teams backgrounds, the paperclip hovers above yellow legal pad paper on a pedestal in a cement-walled basement, seemingly exiled to the dungeon of bad tech ideas. Clippy can now permanently live in Word files, Outlook emails, or other common workplace apps. The character replaced a plain old paperclip in Microsoft 365 to help liven up the company’s emojis and indulge a social media outpouring. Last year, Microsoft officially revived the Office Assistant that debuted in Office 97. But nearly three decades after its genesis at the Redmond tech giant, Clippit-better known as Clippy-improbably lives on. Time labeled it one of the 50 worst inventions ever. Almost immediately, computer geeks and neophytes panned it. Many users found its polite but presumptuous suggestions invasive, obnoxious, and creepy. The metallic office supply bounced around the margins of documents and never stopped looking over our shoulders, even as it blinked back at us impatiently. “It looks like you’re writing a letter,” a googly-eyed, caterpillar-browed paperclip in Microsoft Word observed when we may or may not have been trying to write a letter. Then, out of nowhere, an incorporeal know-it-all popped up to make us feel even worse about the novel notion of word processing in the mid-’90s. T he blank screen was already intimidating enough.
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