Clippy just won’t die — thanks, Windows 11
It’s been a long time since we’ve seen Microsoft’s infamous Clippy character in anything other than memes, but over the next few months, he’ll return to Microsoft 365 products as part of a big update aimed at making more than 1,800 emoji look cuter and more three dimensional.
Those emoji look pretty good, too — you can check some of them out in the video (embedded below) Microsoft put out this week in a Medium post detailing the big emoji update. The goal is to bring Microsoft 365 products like Office and Teams more into line with the company’s Fluent Design System, a design vocabulary the company began publicly rolling out a few years ago to succeed its Metro design language.
You can see Fluent most clearly in the new softer, rounder look of Windows 11, which — according to a Medium post published by the Microsoft Design team explaining the dramatic redesign — is meant to look “softer, friendlier, and less intimidating” through Fluent Design.
This is potentially a big deal if you have strong feelings about Clippy, a character that was often criticized in the ’90s and early 2000s for being an ever-present, often annoying pop-up in Microsoft Office. Originally branded Clippit, the character was the most prominent (and for many users, irritating) face of the Microsoft Office Assistant, which would pop up while customers were using Office when it detected an opportunity to offer help or tips.
As you might expect, most people quickly grew to hate the character, so much so that Microsoft ran a tongue-in-cheek publicity campaign in 2002 promoting the then-newest version of Microsoft Office, Office XP, by touting the fact that Clippy was being removed. The company even published some anti-Clippy ads and at least one browser-based game which let players pelt Clippy with office supplies.
