Microsoft Threatens To Bring Back Clippy

On today's installment of old internet throwbacks approximately no one asked for, it seems Clippy, our favorite aggressively altruistic anthropomorphic paperclip may soon rise from Microsoft's vast graveyard of defunct features to annoy us once again. On Wednesday, the tech company took to social media to propose a threat bargain for the good people of Twitter – if a post depicting a new, illustrated version of Clippy garnered more than 20,000 likes, the company would “replace the paperclip emoji in Microsoft 365 with Clippy.” 

Despite Clippy's widespread infamy, the post quickly went viral, surpassing the set goal of 20,000 likes. However, Microsoft has stayed intentionally vague on whether the world's most annoying early aughts digital assistant will make a not-so triumphant return or if the post was merely for clips and giggles. Shortly after the tweet surpassed its like benchmark, a fan reached out to the company to ask if they were serious about the icon's return, to which they replied a very ominous “wait and find out.”

Yet as The Verge noted, this is far from the first time Clippy, who was removed from Microsoft Word in 2001, has reared his metallic head. In 2019, he made a brief comeback after a group of evidently rogue employees introduced an animated sticker in Microsoft Teams' chat function depicting the litte shi-- sorry,  paperclip, however, the company swiftly removed him shortly after. 

“Clippy has been trying to get his job back since 2001, and his brief appearance on GitHub was another attempt,” a Microsoft spokesperson told the tech outlet shortly after the incident. “While we appreciate the effort, we have no plans to bring Clippy to Teams.”

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