PaulHoule 4 days ago | next |

I was thinking about that the other day.

I had a run in with Clippy last year when I had to install Office '98 to work with some old files. It installed Clippy and he worked really well.

My take on Clippy was that it was backed by a highly effective full-text search of the help, which was remarkable, because people didn't expect full-text search of help to be effective at all in the 1990s. (e.g. Google demolished people's expectations of full-text search)

The goal of Clippy the character was to get people to try the search, but I think a lot of people were turned off by the character and didn't get to realize how good the search was.

Cortana also had a lot of baggage because of trying to be a character, maybe Microsoft is right to give it a bland icon that blends into the background because at least people won't be offended by the icon.

muzani 3 days ago | root | parent |

Some of the criticism of Clippy is that it just stares at you while you're trying to do work. Cortana doesn't stare at least.

wkat4242 4 days ago | prev | next |

Clippy was extremely useless. It was really good at being annoying and nothing else. It still carries that reputation to people that used it.

There were many early memes around it. "I see you're slamming the keyboard in frustration, will I turn on caps lock for you?"

There's no way they'll want to associate copilot with that. It would be a huge marketing fail.

On the other hand, Microsoft marketing is the worst in the industry by far so yeah it's kinda surprising they haven't gone there :)

wmil 4 days ago | root | parent |

Originally it used a bayesian learning algorithm, so if you kept dismissing it in frustration it would stop appearing.

However the product people decided that it would be the major feature to market the new office version. Thus they demanded that Clippy appear more often so that they could show off the feature easily.

rsynnott 4 days ago | prev | next |

Were you around when Clippy was actually a thing? Everybody _hated_ it. It was a major embarrassment for Microsoft. Like, there’s a reason they discontinued it.

Now, everyone appears to also hate copilot, but if you’re in Microsoft’s shoes you don’t want to pre-doom it by associating it with the hated paperclip.

sircastor 3 days ago | prev | next |

> Clippy, on the other hand, is very charismatic.

Clippy was not popular. While I like the idea of a character that you can relate to, but I think it doesn't really fit in the modern context. When Clippy arrived, computers had really just broken into the mainstream - they were still magic boxes and there were a lot of efforts to soften them and make them accessible to "normal people"

I think these days computers are seen simply as a tool, and the animations of a couple of decades ago are seen as distracting or superfluous now.

As an aside, I found it odd that Microsoft chose to name its voice assistant after Cortana back in the VA craze of the last decade. It seemed like a poor choice to me as it was conflating the game experience with a real-life experience.

throwaway5292 3 days ago | prev | next |

Because you could turn Clippy off.

You can 'agree' to Copilot not offering help. But that doesn't 'turn it off', just agree with it to turn to another use mode while it 'sits there'.

Copilot does not crash, copilot crashes you.

dave4420 4 days ago | prev | next |

I’m not sure anyone has fond memories of Clippy?

muzani 3 days ago | root | parent | next |

I actually loved Clippy, but I was a teenager. I think for people who were trying to get stuff done instead of playing around with a word processor, it's as annoying as those onboarding tutorials.

daemonologist 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I think many people have a kind of half ironic nostalgia for it. Especially if you were a kid at the time, it was one of the few sort-of-fun things to mess with on a locked down school or office computer.

pestaa 4 days ago | prev | next |

Clippy is a dreamchild of the nineties, when IT corporations dared to have fun.

Apparently it's not allowed anymore...

Spooky23 3 days ago | prev | next |

Clippy has been vilified by memes way beyond its reality. Microsoft was courting new computer users then, and those users liked Clippy.

But more importantly, somebody would need to give a shit. Microsoft segments everything out internally, whomever “owns” excel is a director of directors and is too disconnected.

Copilot is even worse, as it’s a top down “Copilot all of the things” initiative from the top.