In one of the company’s Teams backgrounds, the paperclip hovers above yellow legal pad paper on a pedestal in a cement-walled basement, seemingly exiled to the dungeon of bad tech ideas. Clippy can now permanently live in Word files, Outlook emails, or other common workplace apps. The character replaced a plain old paperclip in Microsoft 365 to help liven up the company’s emojis and indulge a social media outpouring. Last year, Microsoft officially revived the Office Assistant that debuted in Office 97. But nearly three decades after its genesis at the Redmond tech giant, Clippit-better known as Clippy-improbably lives on. Time labeled it one of the 50 worst inventions ever. Almost immediately, computer geeks and neophytes panned it. Many users found its polite but presumptuous suggestions invasive, obnoxious, and creepy. The metallic office supply bounced around the margins of documents and never stopped looking over our shoulders, even as it blinked back at us impatiently. “It looks like you’re writing a letter,” a googly-eyed, caterpillar-browed paperclip in Microsoft Word observed when we may or may not have been trying to write a letter. Then, out of nowhere, an incorporeal know-it-all popped up to make us feel even worse about the novel notion of word processing in the mid-’90s. T he blank screen was already intimidating enough.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |