The demoted MS worker gets his revenge
Clippy, Microsoft ’s unwanted, unloved Office assistant, once listed as one of Time’s 50 Worst Inventions , is experiencing a renaissance.
You remember Clippy. He was the animated paper clip who would pop up, uninvited, in Microsoft Office to state the obvious and offer unwanted advice: “It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?” Some found that annoying. He was later forced into retirement.
But today, ugly Christmas sweaters featuring Clippy are listed for hundreds of dollars on eBay. In December, he showed up on a handmade sign at a Las Vegas esports tournament ; in September he was stolen from a New York bar.
And in June, a software developer named Ayushmaan
Bordoloi rebooted him as an AI chatbot. Thousands of people downloaded his Clippy app, which looked like the original, but had its chatting capabilities provided by OpenAI’s GPT software.
That AI incursion was a step too far for Microsoft, which has a longstanding love-hate rela
tionship with the sad-eyed paper clip. A few months after he released his code, Bordoloi received an email from Microsoft’s Trademarks Team, asking him to confirm his software was “properly authorized.”
It wasn’t, and Bordoloi has since rebranded his chatbot as Paperclip, much to his chagrin. “They’re really just doing it for the name, which they don’t use, and that’s basically unfair,” he said.
“Clippy isn’t just a paper clip, he’s a legend,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. “He may have been retired , but he never gave up,” adding Clippy continues to be celebrated in memes, fan art and tattoos.
Paper-clip pariah
For a character whose whole purpose is to help, Clippy has endured a lot of controversy.
From the start, he was an underdog, said Kevan Atteberry, the graphic artist who created Clippy, while working as a contractor for Microsoft in the mid-1990s.
Clippy was one of 240 characters Atteberry and a group of designers whipped up for Microsoft Bob, an attempt to make
Microsoft’s software more human-friendly that bombed in the mid-1990s. Microsoft’s software developers found him condescending and unhelpful, Atteberry said.
“They all seemed to have this huge disdain for Clippy.”
Internally, Microsoft developers referred to him as TFC: That F—Clown. In product materials, he was given a name almost nobody used: Clippit.
Microsoft brought in Stanford University professors Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass to help with product development and see what regular folks thought about the characters. In studies, Clippy ranked highly, Reeves said.
But they weren’t crazy about his behavior. “Clippy was inappropriate, impolite, not very socially elegant,” Reeves said. “Don’t interrupt people while they’re writing.”
By 2001, Clippy was given the pink slip. That year, Microsoft focused an animated advertisement for Microsoft Office XP software on a single selling point: No Clippy. “Next to Microsoft Bob, you are the most annoying thing in computer history,” a user tells Clippy, who was voiced by comedian Gilbert Gottfried.
After Clippy bombed, Atteberry was embarrassed about his creation. He kept it out of his design portfolio. “People did hate him. The press hated him. Everywhere you heard these slanderous things about Clippy, and I didn’t want to be tied to him.”
One day, Atteberry was at a client’s office when Clippy popped up on-screen. “I created that,” he said. “Most people don’t like it.”
“I don’t like it either,” his client said. “But it’s cool that you
By 2001, Clippy was given the pink slip.
created it.”
Clippy, ‘erotically appealing?’
Today, Atteberry, now a children’s-book author, has reassessed his twisted metal creation. At a writer’s retreat recently, he was asked to bring a 3-D model of Clippy so others could get their picture taken with him and the paper clip.
Over two decades, Clippy has remained among Microsoft’s most recognizable brands. He’s popped up in “The Simpsons,” “Saturday Night Live” and “Family Guy.”
And on Amazon , he is the subject of an erotic ebook of fan fiction titled “Conquered by Clippy.”
Its author, a London, Ontario, writer who goes by the pen name Leonard Delaney, said he wrote the ebook as a more curvy follow to an erotic story about Tetris blocks.
“Clippy has that erotically appealing mix of being a bit annoying but also alluring,” he said. “He’s a bad boy, like Christian…from ‘Fifty Shades of Grey.’ ”
He sent a warning with the ebook: “Clippy gets up to some pretty extreme stuff here, so make sure you are 18+ and not opening this up on a work computer.”
You can buy Clippy earrings, coffee mugs and T-shirts on Etsy . For $10, get a 3-D-printed Clippy figurine. That is a hot item. Last fall, purchasing software company Order.co had four of the figurines stolen during a competitive Excel match at a Manhattan brewery.
Starting in 2021, Microsoft began campaigning in earnest to take back Clippy. It started with a tweet. “If this gets 20k likes, we’ll replace the paper clip emoji in Microsoft 365 with Clippy,” the company promised and threatened. The tweet has 156,000 likes and Clippy is part of Microsoft 365.
That same year, close to 25 years after Clippy’s introduction, Microsoft filed papers to trademark its annoying-butlovable paper clip.
Clippy still pops up at Microsoft. This past week, on a visit to Microsoft’s San Francisco offices, Clippy was spotted offering advice on a conference-room monitor on how to get audiovisual support.
But navigating the branding waters of this historic chatbot isn’t without perils.
Bordoloi, maker of the Clippy AI program, thinks Microsoft made a mistake last year when it gave its latest AI technology the name Copilot. “It just sounds kind of generic,” he said. “Clippy would be a lot better.”
Maybe, like so many revolutionaries, Clippy was just ahead of his time.
Stanford’s Reeves said Clippy paved the way, showing people want to interact with computers in a human way, as seen with Amazon’s Alexa and Apple ’s Siri. “I think the way AI is being marketed now is absolutely the revenge of Clippy.”
Tom Dotan contributed to this article.