Once a hallmark of everyone’s Microsoft Office experience, It’s been a while since
our favourite paper clip has offered advice on grammar, formatting and everything in between.
So what actually happened to Clippy?
Why did Microsoft introduce the character and then kill him off again in the space of
just a few years?
And how is Clippy now making a comeback via Twitter more than ten years after he disappeared.
Here’s How It Happened.
Back in the mid 90s, computers were still seen very much as a business device and were
rarely in family homes.
Hoping to change all that was Microsoft’s first attempt at building a virtual assistant,
Bob, and his cartoon sidekick Rover the dog.
Unsurprisingly, most users found the software patronising and the program was discontinued
after less than a year.
But Microsoft still felt that more could be done to bridge the gap between the latest
technology and a whole generation of adults who were illiterate with computers.
And they believed the answer to their dilemma was Clippy, the Office Assistant first released
with the 1997 version of Windows Office.
Officially called Clippit, the paperclip was the default option to help you out with the
likes of Word, Powerpoint or Excel And with input from social psychologists from
Stanford University, was carefully designed to be as useful as possible.
Clippy would bounce onto your screen when opening up a new document to provide advice
on everything from page layout to spelling, and could be animated to bring some much-needed
excitement to your tasks.
What’s more is that Clippy wasn’t the only choice for this role, as some of the
other friendly options for your assistant included Rover, Merlin the wizard and Genius,
a caricature of Albert Einstein.
So despite Microsoft’s best intentions, exactly what happened to send this piece of
folded up wire to the recycle bin?
To be honest, most users simply described Clippy as useless.
At best it was a light-hearted but ineffective animation in the corner of your screen, and
at its worst it was deterring customers from using Microsoft Office and pushing them to
rival applications.
As you can imagine, the AI of 25 years ago was much more primitive than Siri and Alexa
are today, and most suggestions made by Clippy were completely irrelevant, making the Help
tab a much more efficient way of resolving any issues.
The assistant’s most infamous interruption was to ask if you were writing a letter any
time you typed out the word ‘dear’ on screen, a suggestion even mocked by Microsoft
themselves in their own spoof ad campaign in 2001, accompanying the announcement that
Clippy would no longer be on by default
Their excuse for PR purposes was that Office XP is so easy to use that Clippy is no longer
necessary, or useful
Another way of saying that Windows users were glad to finally see the back of it
Clippy continued to lurk in the settings of Microsoft Office for a few more years though,
that was until the feature was discontinued altogether in 2007.
But fast forward to 2021, and Clippy is making a comeback.
Not as a Virtual Assistant, Cortana has that covered, which you can learn about in our
dedicated video, But in the form of an Emoji on Microsoft 365.
The company tweeted back in July that with their new set of 3D emojis coming up, they
would feature the character as the replacement for the paperclip if they received over 20,000
likes.
Of course the tweet flew past the 100,000 mark and in doing so resurrected the avatar
that hadn’t been seen for over 20 years.
Don’t forget to leave a comment about your Clippy experiences, or what video you’d
like to see next.
That’s how it happened.
And thanks for watching.