Last Updated on June 13, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
Clippy was the unofficial nickname of the office assistant, a feature present in Microsoft Office 97 and Microsoft Office 2000. His proper name was Clippit, but nobody I knew called him that. Clippit, or Clippy, was inspired by Microsoft Bob, a misguided attempt to make Microsoft Office friendlier, more helpful, and easier to use. But most frequently, it was more annoying than any of those other things. On April 11, 2001, Microsoft announced the Office Assistant would no longer be enabled by default in future versions. Clippy was retiring. And there was much rejoicing.
Why Clippy was the feature we loved to hate
When you used Microsoft Office, Clippy was always appearing at the most inopportune times. Clippy probably meant well, but gave lowest common denominator advice. Someone who already knew how to type a letter didn’t find Clippy’s suggestions about typing a letter helpful. And maybe it was just me, but I found Clippy’s gratiutous animation distracting. When I was trying to write a book chapter, the last thing I needed was a paper clip in the corner of my screen twisting itself into shapes and trying to be cute.
This meme seems pretty rare now. At least it took me a long time to find it. But it circulated widely in 1998, and I certainly shared it.
I didn’t want Microsoft Office to annoy me with that obnoxious paper clip constantly or when I least expected it. I just wanted it to go away. Was it too much to ask for a word processor to show words on the screen when I typed them and let me go back and correct them when I typed the wrong ones?
I wanted Office 95 back, frankly. Office 95 was 32-bit and stable. It didn’t have an office assistant and it didn’t do realtime spelling or grammar checking, so it was fast too. It wasn’t as fast as Word for Windows 2.0, which ran nicely even on a 386. But Office 95 ran fine on a 486 and really nicely on Pentium-grade systems.
The problems Microsoft tried to solve with Clippy
Clippy was trying to solve two problems. Arguably, Clippy meant well and so did the developers who created Clippy.
Computers were too hard to use
The first problem was the perception that computers were hard to use. Clippy provided a virtual coach who could help you figure out how to use Word and Excel and Powerpoint.
What to do with all that computing power
The second was the embarrassment of riches in 1990s computing. We don’t remember it now, but when the 486 came out, and again when the Pentium came out, analysts questioned what we would do with all that power. The answer with the Pentium was division errors (FDIV FTW!), and with the 486, Clippy.
We never ask those kinds of questions anymore. Either we learned our lesson, or we got used to software just growing into whatever computing resources we have available to it. Not only that, we’ve gotten used to software using what we have available locally and having to supplement it with power from the cloud.
But when the 486 processor came out in April 1989, two respected analysts, Michael Miller and Michael Slater, both questioned what we were going to use that power for. Both noted that the most popular applications at the time didn’t need the 486’s power. And in the mid 90s, after the Pentium processor came out, and software packages started including words like “Better on Pentium” on the box, my friends and I took that as coded language for “bloated programming.”
One of those pieces of software that really needed a Pentium was Microsoft Bob. And after Microsoft Bob flopped, Microsoft didn’t get the message, and incorporated elements of Bob into other products. Including future versions of Microsoft Office.
I suppose if you’d never used Microsoft Office before, Clippy might have helped you learn it. But we also had books for that.
But Clippy did indeed help to answer the question of what we’d do with that CPU power. Office 95 ran pretty nicely on a 486 processor, but that wasn’t state of the art anymore in 1995. State of the art by then was a Pentium with a clock rate of 120 or 133 MHz, not a wimpy 486 running at a wimpy 66 MHz. And that 486 wasn’t up to the task of checking your spelling and grammar in realtime and drawing squiggly red lines under your mistakes while Clippy celebrated your efforts by twisting itself into odd shapes in the lower right corner of the screen. At least not without noticeable lag as you typed.
Nostalgia 25 years after Clippy retired
Today, Clippy arguably seems less obnoxious and it seems some people may even have nostalgia for him. But I, for one, celebrated when Clippy retired. Maybe I’m just cranky.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
isn’t Clippy back as AI?
Clippy was based on Microsoft Agent. Another Microsoft Agent character was Peedy the parrot and it also had text to speech. Back in those days I built a home automation system that had a sensor in the front door and whenever the door opened Peedy would announce “Front Door Open!” Well that backfired a it when we had a son and first I’d hear Peedy say “Front Door Open!” and then our son say “Front Door Open!”. Being taught how to speak by Peedy might qualify as a disability. But what I always wanted was a full screen variant of MS Agent instead of a tiny character on the screen, then you could have an almost life sized representative announcing events and delivering news. Probably impossible for the time.
It was annoying, but they should have reworded it instead of just removing it, I thought it was nice