Microsoft has faced the facts that nobody really wants to use lame clip art in the year 2015. As this year draws to a close, so does the era of clip art for Microsoft Office.
Now, users are going to be able to utilize Creative Commons images from Bing Image Search rather than the clip art library they previously had access to. In a post on the Microsoft Office blog, the Office 365 team writes:
Starting today, customers searching for Online Pictures in Office desktop products worldwide will view and download royalty-free images curated through Bing Images. The Office.com Clip Art and image library has closed shop. Usage of Office’s image library has been declining year-to-year as customers rely more on search engines.
Bing Image Search has higher quality images that are more up-to-date. For example, searching for “cellphone” gives more variety and modern looking phones instead of the old-school bricks from Clip Art. Also, Bing uses a copyright filter based on the Creative Commons licensing system. These are images you can use, share, or modify for either personal or commercial use (settings can be switched to Show all web results to view more images).
Presumably, the photographers behind the images being used for this won’t have a problem with this like some do with Yahoo’s play to make money on Creative Commons Flickr images.
Image via Microsoft