Bing Images has more options for users.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BENGALURU: Before Google or even the Internet revolution, Microsoft’s Clip Art was the only tool available for desktop users to convey ideas in the form of pictures on a Word document or PowerPoint presentation. But those days are long gone, and now Microsoft has killed Clip Art forever.
Earlier in this week, Microsoft announced that Clip Art has entered the final few hours of its long journey that started with Word 6.0 in 1993. Back then, Clip Art had just 82 images that users could insert into the document. As Microsoft Office developed over the years so did the image repository of Clip Art. Currently, the cloud portfolio of Clip Art has more than 100,000 images.
The decision of Microsoft to kill Clip Art eventually came after the Bing Images, owned by the company, was showcased as a better tool for inserting images. Bing Image has a wide range of pictures and gives more options for the user while selecting images for their document. But one of the major caveats was the copyright issue as a majority of images that appear online are bound by the Copyright Law.
Microsoft answered this by enabling “creative commons” filter in Office Tools to show only the copy left images in the search. Microsoft official blog post read, “However, you are responsible for respecting others’ rights, including copyright.”
This is not the first time that Microsoft is pulling the plug of its old utilities. Earlier this year the company had killed MSN Messenger, one of the first chat services, which lost prominence after the advent of Facebook and Google.