Here's a piece of interesting news. Microsoft has announced that it is creating an "Academic Themed" animated "Office Assistant" helper for its new Microsoft Word, to ship with its next version of its popular Office Suite. Tim Connoley, one of the head project designers, said that "Many of our valued users--particularly those engaged in academic pursuits and lifestyles--felt that the current lineup of office assistants, including Clippet(TM), the paperclip, and Rocky(TM) the dog were just too juvenile and did not really complement the new types of customizable writing scapes we are building into this new Word. The Derrida-Bot solves these problems in a major, major way--I'm very excited, and the initial reports from our testing groups are very exciting."

The Derrida-bot will differ from the current office assitants in several important ways. Probably what academics will find most appealing about the Derrida-bot is his deconstructive approach to helping them solve common interface problems, such as how to format a page header or setting up a mail merge. For instance, if you type "How do I mail merge?" into the Derrida-bot, he will respond: "That's a very interesting question. Let's start by breaking down what you mean by 'mail merge.' It's no coincidence that "mail" sounds like "male" in English. Nothing is a coincidence. Nor is this effort to 'merge' the 'males', which makes sense when you consider that wo-man is already a 'male-merged' being. Anyway, what differance would it really make if you merged this male or did not? Answer that question."

Connoley says that the point of the Derrida-bot is "not to make things simpler--that's not what academics want. If you go to an academic conference and ask a simple question--such as, let's say, 'What is Microsoft Word?' You're not going to here [sic], 'That's a word processor--even the best word processor.' You're going to be sitting there for hours listening to people talk about everything else but that. They're going to start talking social construction and rhetorical theory, being critical of technology, and so on and so forth. So, what we've built here with Derrida-bot is a way to problematicize and complicate every possible issue or question the user brings to it."

User: "How do I insert a footnote?"
Derrida-Bot: "Footnote. Foot/note. Foot INTO note. Take off your shoes and look at those feet. You see tows? No, you see TOES. Yet what you want to do is TOW that NOTE TOE/wards the bottom. I see a binary opposition here. Do your selves see such an opposition?"

Speaking of footnotes, Derrida-bot can also insert footnotes to footnotes to footnotes. Also, the green squiggly lines that appear under text will not appear when Derrida-bot is activated.