We live in a time of artificial intelligences, home assistants, smartphones and promises of a future in which to make a Powerpoint you only need to ask Copilot, the new Microsoft Office AI. But before Copilot, Siri, Alexa and even Google, there was already an assistant that spread terror every time you wanted to write anything with its unstable suggestions: Do you remember Clippy?
Clippy, no, I don’t want to write a letter
To understand Clippy we have to go back to March 1995, when Microsoft launched Bob, an alternative interface for Windows 95, Windows 3.1x and Windows NT in which you navigated the length and breadth of a house using what you found instead of icons. For example, if you clicked on a pen and paper on Bob’s desktop, it took you to the word processor, and if you selected a clock, it took you to the calendar. They expected to sell millions worldwide. They sold 58,000 copies.
Microsoft was not going to give up so easily: Bob had been a resounding failure, but from its ashes was born Clippy, the text assistant of Office 97, a paper clip with eyes that advised users on different ways to improve the formatting of their text and opened up the exciting world of Office. Famous was his “You look like you want to write a letter” every time you typed two or three words, but it was not the only one of his suggestions.
The culprit behind Clippy’s existence was Kevan Atteberry, who told Vice how they prepared more than 250 attendees to select the ones that the audience of Stanford test groups and social psychologists liked best: Clippy was the best in every respect. The problem is that people ended up hating him…although Atteberry has a theory: it’s not because of how he looked, but because of what they made him say and do. “No matter which character became the default character, they would do the same things and probably be hated as well.”
And along with Clippy there was a whole host of characters that everyone wanted to ignore, from a red ball to a superhero dog to a robot and even a caricature of William Shakespeare. By the time the Office Assistant experiment ended with the release of 2007, there were 23, including some Mac exclusives or Asian editions (the Kairu dolphin).
The future may have a few surprises in store for us in 2023, organizing our mails automatically, preparing summaries and even conversing with us without asking us if we are preparing a letter, but a small part of us will always know that all this would not have been possible without a paper clip with eyes. Try explaining it to someone from generation Z without them looking at you like you’re speaking Chinese.
