Microsoft hints at a Clippy comeback, and people go mad about it

Many users want Clippy to be Copilot's mascot

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Microsoft is testing Clippy's popularity again

If you’re younger, you probably don’t know that Clippy was an anthropomorphic assistant included in Microsoft Office software from the early 2000’s. Well, his official name was Clippit, but everyone called him Clippy.

Clippy was last used in 2004, in Office 2003, but Microsoft outed the animated character from later versions. Even if it wasn’t used anymore, users never forgot Clippy. In the last 5 years, there have been some references that hinted at its potential comeback. For instance, in 2021, Microsoft Teams got a lot of stickers with Clippy, and his fans never hesitated to make references to the beloved character.

Clippy’s popularity is off the charts

Some even made a ChatGPT assistant using the image of a derpy-looking Clippy. Now, Microsoft posted on X a simple drawing of Clippy in Paint, and everybody went crazy. The post got over 500K views and over 450 reactions, most of them positive.

The comments mostly are all about asking Microsoft to bring back Clippy, with some advocating to make it the face of Copilot.

Well, we don’t really know if Microsoft is testing the waters to see if they should bring back Clippy or it’s just a social media play around Microsoft Paint. However, if it was a test of Clippy’s popularity, it was a successful one.

Most people are nostalgic about this animated character, but some of us who actually had him around in Microsoft Office don’t have such nice memories. The first thing I was doing right after starting Office was to close Clippy.

Clippy’s role was to give you some pointers on how to use the app but after a while, he was repeating the same tips over and over, and became just a distraction you didn’t need on your desktop. So, to refresh your memory a bit, the animated stationery character was out because he was hated by many Office users.

This is not the first attempt to revive Clippy. In 2021, Microsoft posted on Twitter (now X) an image of a Clippy modern design saying that if the post gets 20k likes, they will replace the paperclip emoji in Microsoft 365 with Clippy.

Well, the post had 175k likes and Microsoft included Clippy in the emoji update the next day.

Now, Microsoft has another chance to benefit from its popularity. However, we all hope that the software giant learned from past mistakes and made the character less invasive or at least more helpful. An AI-infused Clippy is the most plausible change to it, but we’ll just need to see what are Microsot’s plans.

Do you want Microsoft to revive Clippy in its animated form? Let’s talk about this in the comments below.

More about the topics: AI, Microsoft Office

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