Some reviews for Adobe CS2 have complained about how unintuitive the latest incarnations of the suite's icons are:

They're cute -- but what the hell is the seashell?

Anyway, I post about this because I learned this fun fact from meta about the disappearance of the familiar 'eye' icon for Photoshop: they had to get rid of it because it freaked out the Japanese customers.

In trying to understand this revulsion to eyes on your desktop -- as a former user of XEyes -- I am reminded of another story that meta shared about her mother and Clippy. Most people are just annoyed by the Office paperclip, but her mom was fully freaked out because, "there's this thing on my computer, amd it keeps rolling its eyes at me!"

The bird is watching you:

addendum:

discussing the now-discontinued Adobe Atmosphere product:

meta: did i tell you what it looked like when adobe had just bought it and before we re-worked the ui?
me: nope
meta: it was dark grey... very gloomy looking. and LOTS of windows.
meta: but the worst part was... in the upper corner, where you'd usually have the close button in OS 9....
meta: they had eyes. on EVERY window.
me: hahaaha
meta: no, it gets worse.
meta: i was looking at it over this guy's shoulder.... and i kept sensing movement in my peripheral vision. but when i looked to where it was.... it was always the same as before.
meta: then, i finally caught it.
meta: THE EYES WERE BLINKING!