If there’s one thing that turn an otherwise professional looking document into a piece of horrifying garbage it’s clip art. Back in the days when graphics on computers were a still a nascent field, one populated with people with little artistic style, they were the go-to source for images to convey a message. Today however, with clip art’s failure to modernize in any way (mostly due to the users who desperately cling to it’s disgustingly iconic style) it’s become a trademark of documents that have had little to no thought put into them. Microsoft has been aware of this for some time, drastically reducing the amount of clip art present in Office 2010 and moving the entire library online in Office 2013. Now that library no longer contains any clip art at all, now it just points to Bing Images.
As someone who’s had to re-enable access to clip art more times then he’d have liked to I’m glad Microsoft has made this move as whilst it won’t likely see everyone become a graphic designer overnight it will force them to think long and hard about the images they’re putting into their documents. The limited set of images provided as part of clip art usually meant people would try to shoehorn multiple images together in order to convey what they were after, rather than attempting create something in Visio or just searching through the Internet. Opening it up to the Bing Image search engine, which by default filters to images which have the appropriate Creative Commons licensing, is obviously done in a hope that more people will use the service although whether they will or not remains to be seen.
However what’s really interesting about this is what it says about where Microsoft is looking to go in the near term when it comes to its Office line of products. Most people wouldn’t know it but Microsoft has been heavily investing in developing Office to be a much more modern set of documentation tools, retaining their trademark backwards compatibility whilst making it far more easier to make documents that are clean, professional and, above all, usable. The reason why most people wouldn’t know about it is that their latest product, Sway, isn’t yet part of the traditional Office product suite but with Microsoft’s push to get everyone on Office 365 I can’t see that being the case for too long.
Sway is essentially a replacement for PowerPoint, yet another Microsoft product that’s been lauded for it’s gaudy design principles and gross overuse in certain situations. However instead of focusing just on slides and text it’s designed to be far more interactive and inter-operable, able to gather data from numerous different sources and present it in a format that’s far more pleasing than any PowerPoint presentation I’ve seen. Unfortunately it’s still in closed beta for the time being so I can’t give you my impressions with it (I’ve been on the waiting list for some time now) but suffice to say if Sway is the future of Microsoft’s Office products than the ugly history of clip art might end up just being a bad memory.
It’s just more evidence that the Microsoft of today is nothing like the one it was in the past. Microsoft is still a behemoth of a company, one that’s more beholden to it’s users than it’d like to admit, but we’re finally starting to see some forms of innovation from them rather than their old strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish. Whether its users will embrace the new way of doing things or cling to the old (like they continue to do) will be the crux of Microsoft’s strategy going forward but either way it’s an exciting time if you’re a Microsoft junkie like myself.
