Microsoft’s Clippy has had a hard life. Born in Office 97, Clippy politely offered hints for using Microsoft’s Office software. Often misunderstood, you either loved or hated its soulful eyes and “Groucho eyebrows” (as Microsoft described them) when it popped up on screen to please or annoy you. While Clippy lived a rather short and eventful life until Office XP in 2001, Microsoft killed off its Office Assistant in favor of new Office features like smart tags and task panes. Clippy has been trying to find a job at Microsoft ever since, and this week it looked like the loveable paperclip was back for good.
Microsoft resurrected Clippy on Tuesday, transforming the paperclip into an animated pack of stickers for the company’s Teams chat software. These stickers were then released on Microsoft’s official Office developer GitHub page earlier this week, free for any Microsoft Teams users to import and use them for fun. Unfortunately, Clippy disappeared a day later, vanishing once again into the deep Microsoft archives.
“Clippy has been trying to get his job back since 2001, and his brief appearance on GitHub was another attempt,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. “While we appreciate the effort, we have no plans to bring Clippy to Teams.”
A source familiar with the situation at Microsoft tells The Verge that the “brand police” inside the company weren’t happy that Clippy had appeared in Microsoft Teams, and immediately ordered the brutal firing of the anthropomorphic paperclip. Microsoft has now killed the GitHub project associated with Clippy for Microsoft Teams, and Clippy is once again searching for a new job. There’s still hope, though.
Clippy fans have started a petition of sorts to restore its star role in Microsoft Teams. If you want to see Clippy return as a sticker messaging pack, you can vote for it right here. Microsoft often responds to direct feedback from its uservoice sites, and the top request right now is for private channels in Microsoft Teams. This feature will appear later this year, alongside a bunch of new inventive additions to make Slack users jealous.
Here’s a taste of the fun animations included in the Clippy sticker pack. Thanks for all the memories and memes Clippy. Good luck in your job hunt.
Comments
Eternal punishment.
By marcprez on 03.22.19 7:50am
Poor Clippy
By Tom Warren on 03.22.19 7:53am
Well, with such a strong jobs market, Clippy should be able to get back on his feet in no time. I hear Apple is hiring.
By Demitryus on 03.22.19 7:58am
Amazon needs new hires for HQ2.
By zduboss on 03.22.19 8:02am
By zduboss on 03.22.19 8:08am
Hold on, Clippy. Just hold on!
drops single tear
By 100PercentCori on 03.22.19 8:10am
Hang on clippy, clippy hang on!
By dwightk on 03.22.19 8:11am
Clippy > Cortana.
Change my mind.
By Uncle Lincoln on 03.22.19 8:21am
Correct
By longlivewisdom on 03.22.19 10:49am
DR. HALSEY: Master Chief, due to Cortana’s rampancy, we have developed a new AI assistant for your Mjolnir armor.
Holographic Clippy materializes on the table and gives a friendly wave.
MASTER CHIEF: Aww, crap…
By Johnny Socko on 03.22.19 12:37pm
That would be a hilarious Easter Egg inside the Halo remastered release!
By cpldaniel on 03.24.19 10:19pm
Did anyone save or fork the pack?
By brad007 on 03.22.19 9:14am
Microsoft really needs to lighten up about Clippy. No one really associates today’s applications with what was going on in an era when Office was distributed on floppy disks.
Maybe it’s just insecurity about Cortana not catching on?
By sing_electric on 03.22.19 10:38am
I think it’s more about how the internet had a field day with Clippy for the last decade.
By BausFight on 03.22.19 11:36am
I think so too, although that’s a better reason to bring clippy back!
By Stone Cold Dan Quinn on 03.22.19 12:11pm
Actually, it started in ‘97 when he first appeared. Clippy represented everything people hated about MS, apparently. Lately tho the worm has turned, judging by the affectionate comments on this thread. I’m totally bemused. Will we be seeing a Clippy movie soon…?
By John Gallant on 03.22.19 6:39pm
Well that’s when Clippy was created, but the mocking of it didn’t seem to really come to a point until much later. I remember Clippy back in 98, I was probably in 9th grade. I don’t remember anyone making fun of it. Fast forward to the mid/late 2000s or so, Clippy was the butt of every joke online.
By BausFight on 03.23.19 8:00am
I don’t think it’s soreness about Clippy, specifically. It’s almost definitely more an issue of checking to see if MS is ready to let one of its iconic, for better or worse, things get out in an uncontrolled manner. They probably just didn’t follow the correct approval processes.
Microsoft in general seems to have lightened up a lot in the last 5 years, and generally jumped in on all the memes. Which is probably why this project came to see the light of day in the first place. I might be wrong, but I imagine if the execs got wind of this with just a little public backing, they would likely speedily greenlight it with a slightly cheeky apology and a make good. Iono. I’d like to have Clippy in the background of my Xbox profile pic. Maybe dress him up in the various styles of Xbox 1st party IP.. mm.. Master Chief Clippy. Marcus Fenix Clippy. Viva Pinata Clippy.
By cyrribrae on 03.25.19 6:31am
#JusticeForClippy
By skylake on 03.22.19 10:50am
I find it a little amusing how the entirety of humanity has just collectively decided the character’s name is "Clippy," not "Clippit," which is what it actually was.
By atomicglee on 03.22.19 10:51am
It was changed to "Clippy" officially somewhere between Office 2000 and Office 2003, I’m pretty sure. It was definitely after they changed his design from the clip-art-y original variant in a box to the free-standing 3D paperclip.
By Nellko Agogo on 03.22.19 11:14am
Probably they decided Clippit sounded too much like a strange new animal species.
By John Gallant on 03.22.19 6:46pm
Personally I think adding him in as a sticker pack is a cute way to embrace the joke and keep him around for the more nostalgically-inclined, in a nonintrusive way. The "brand police" clearly don’t understand that people like to see a human side of the soulless corporations they buy software from.
By brundolf on 03.22.19 11:27am
Yeah, I’d say the brand police arent the best people to listen to if they are the ones that came up with "teams" or "groove" or any other awful name they have had in the last 10 years
Outside of the surface department, MS has a marketing problem
By K-C-B on 03.22.19 3:59pm
Do they even have marketing outside of Surface stuff?
By goalcam on 03.22.19 10:38pm