Rarely in the history of software has a pile of code been as reviled as “Clippy,” the animated, googly-eyed paperclip Microsoft introduced in 1997, ostensibly to help users of Office. Time magazine dubbed it one of the world’s 50 worst inventions. The man who designed it boasted that his creation, at its peak, “was annoying hundreds of millions of people a day.” Even Microsoft itself ended up creating a self-mocking ad campaign around people’s frustration with this paperclip.
So what was the problem with Clippy? To put it simply: he was bloated.
