Waiting for my coffee to brew, I had a great idea: how to add in a new feature to Word that would be more annoying than Clippy ! (that’s great as in “I don’t use Word so I can laugh at those who must”…)
How about a Bumble Bee (called Bumbly, of course) that looks at the action taken during a spelling check. S/he stores the original incorrect spellings for every word that is corrected so that after a few weeks s/he can learn the sort of typing mistakes that you make the most, as well as the words that you most commonly mis-spell.
Ok, so far so trivial – you’d not have seen Bumbly for the first few weeks after installation as s/he was learning your ‘style’, but then the master stroke: once there is enough data in the mis-dictionary Bumbly will appear when you try to open Word. S/he will buzz around a blank document and spout speech bubbles (all in pale yellow/black, of course) telling you the words that you most commonly mistype. You will have to chase around the screen to click on the close icon to get rid of them, and then the fun starts: Bumbly will quiz you at random once you have closed all of the bubbles and you will have to get at least 3 out of 5 words correct before you can start styping a new document or even let Word continue opening the file you double clicked on !
Genius ! The sale of new PC hardware will go through the roof as apoplectic VP’s soundly thrash their computers in an enraged flash-back to spelling humilations in front of their class when 8 years old. The fact that it will also kill off Word as a viable (ha – I use that word loosly) WP is merely the icing on the cake.
Redmond, are you listening ? This is the next killer feature for Office.