Corpse of Microsoft’s Clippy Still Offers Valuable Lessons
Even the worst ideas can prove… kinda useful?
If you’re a tech pro of a certain age, you no doubt have traumatic memories of Clippy, Microsoft’s “Office Assistant” (rendered as a cheerful, anthropomorphic paperclip) that would pop up at inopportune moments to ask if you needed help writing a letter (for example).
After a lot of blowback from users, Microsoft eventually removed Clippy from Office. That didn’t stop years of memes and jokes about the assistant. In one season of HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” for example, the show’s startup heroes create “Pipey,” which (like Clippy) is unbelievably intrusive and annoying:
Clippy is so toxic, in fact, that when he (she? it?) recently made a brief appearance as a sticker in Microsoft Teams, the company’s Slack-like collaboration software, the reaction was immediate — and Clippy was promptly vaporized again. “Clippy has been trying to get his job back since 2001, and his brief appearance on GitHub was another attempt,” Microsoft wrote in a statement to The Verge…
