10 Biggest Microsoft Mistakes Ever


#8 Clippy

Lesson half learned; Microsoft came up with Clippy, the animated paperclip, an “office assistant”. It was released with Office 97 and supposed to help users with routine task, like formatting a letter in MS word. The paper clip was the default character, but there were other animated assistants like Clippy—The Genius (caricature of Albert Einstein), Power Pup (a dog), and Will (caricature of William Shakespeare). 

So many efforts, so much of cheerful animated assistants, but it took users no time to despise this feature of Office 97. Though Microsoft tried to pull it off by keeping the feature for years, the company in 2001 Web campaign, scrapped Clippy in run up to Office XP, finally bowing to users’ opinion. The company made fun of itself, "Office XP works so easily that it's made Office Assistants like me useless. Obsolete. And, I'm told, hideously unattractive," Clippy said on the Microsoft site.

#7 Hotmail

Microsoft acquired Hotmail in 1997 for whopping $400 million. The hotmail was largest Webmail service, before it started loosing its market share for Google’s Gmail. Microsoft came up with many UI changes over the years, but no attempts could take on with its competitor Gmail. In 2012, Microsoft replaced it with a new free email account, Outlook.com, with a promise of cleaner looks, which better suited for tablets and Smartphones. Yet the possibility of Outlook.com outdoing Gmail is cloudy.