I shall now share a dirty secret that I learnt during my time at Microsoft: not everyone hates Clippy.
People love to hate on the poor guy, including a crazy rumor that there was a child found in the Word:Mac code who was terrorized by Clippy. And check out the comments thread for the video for Again and Again, where Clippy is just dancing his little heart out, but haters gotta hate. Microsoft tried to give him a new gig with Ribbon Hero 2. I even stumbled upon a JavaScript implementation of Clippy today, calling the poor little guy a “failed Microsoft technology”.
But not everyone hates Clippy. I learned this in a most unexpected manner. You see, the Office:Mac website allows people to submit feedback. When I worked there, I would go through that feedback every few weeks to see if there was anything in there that would be helpful to me as I was working on my research. And one day, someone sent in a request for the return of Clippy.
That person gushed on about how useful Clippy was and how they truly missed Clippy. Specifically, they wanted the cat version of Clippy which was (if I recall correctly) unique to the Mac version of Office. They even offered to pay extra for a version of Office that included him. I, of course, forwarded that message along to our marketing team to let them know that they were missing a huge opportunity to create Office:Mac Special Clippy Edition, but strangely that mail went unanswered.
So remember that, the next time you hate on Clippy. You might just be talking to someone who wanted Clippy back so badly that they actually took the time to write to Microsoft to ask for his return.
I had a cat version of Clippy on Windows. I didn’t really use it for anything useful but periodically, when I needed a distraction (I was writing my PhD thesis at the time and it was painful at times) I would righ-click on it and click “Animate!”. It would then do something random, but always adorable – like stretch or yawn. It helped me get through my thesis writing. 🙂 I know how widespread the hate of Clippy is, but I personally would love to have my sleepy cat back if only for a little while… 🙂
I’ve finally found the person who wrote in to request his return! 😉
Let’s also not forget that the default version of “Clippy” on the Mac was Max: a cartoon Mac SE that would, when bored, start twisting itself around like a Rubik’s Cube. Max was, without question, much cooler than Clippy.
Yeah, I remember writing college papers and feeling a bit guilty when Max got fidgety. (If he got really bored, didn’t he fall over and start snoring?)