How Microsoft Designed Clippy for Users in Different Countries | a16z Explains

Key Takeaways

[Music] we got a very long email from our friends in the Japan subsidiary so Japan it was more than half of the office business like it was an incredible partner it's a whole story about the business model and how office rolled out in Japan some really smart decisions from from people but they were like yeah this is this is somewhat disagreeable to us in that very polite gentleman it was one of these official it was translated from English in Japanese at both you got a memo we got a memo got that memo it was it was tough and these are all good friends of ours we you know like this is a very tight I you know been to Japan many times like like I'm still even Thursday Facebook friends with this whole group we can talk about stuff all the time and they went on to explain that the problem is is that the characters have four fingers okay clip you had odo all the character all the character of the characters the fingers they had four and the dot you know everything like cosgrove and and like that's just not really really not the best approach for us hmm and why well there's a lot of more about this in fact it's like a whole Wikipedia article these days about like why it's four fingers all of them it's a Japan Japan culture it's a cultural thing and you just respect it um it turns out it's the Simpsons had this issue like tons of things have these issues before verses five and because animators Five Fingers is it's a lot of drawing and so they they actually don't like five and three looks like an alien right so they don't like three so they've historically animators had used for Nicky has four and that was sort of our defense and they're like but you're not Mickey once you're famous you can have as many fingers as you want so we negotiated a compromise a win-win sort of situation where we would offer remove a couple of assistants and then offer someone's we especially made for Japan so we made this lovely dolphin that swam and then we made one that made us uncomfortable and the time which was office sense I which was it translated loosely is as office lady and if you know when you visited a office building it in the 90s in Japan you were greeted by an office lady yeah and that's just how everything was that was business mhm and we were like wow this is not what we would like is a brand yeah and and so you get this complexity of developing a worldwide product I mean we were shipping in 40 odd languages 150 countries you know how do you balance all of this you we certainly don't want to offend yeah but is it offensive if the assistant is available and so we were like oh maybe we should write code that the assistant won't work in the English and Western versions of interesting right we're gonna be perceived as offensive right and and the thing was it's like they're like it's not offensive and like right it's offensive to us and we're like we're in Japan and we're in this loop right of like so we ended up shipping it and the truth is it sort of gets in so that after the after assistant but like it wasn't offensive and it's it's kind of you really have to go well is it really offensive ever like it was their their culture and you have to respect it yep and this is one of the sort of deep design questions there is right where is empathy for the user versus I know what's best for the user right and this is the age-old pension right and you you overlay like this is a really important business decision right but and if the subsidiaries not behind the feature the product a whole other set of things happen you know it's it's very complex it was fine like it rolled out fine it was all good [Music]