Microsoft's "Office Assistant," aka Clippy, was a giggly-eyed talking paperclip that no one liked. We recently named Clippy, which appeared in Office 97, one of the most famous periods when Windows was at its worst. Clippy was so unpopular that Microsoft itself contributed to the hatred in the form of a series of Office XP ads celebrating Clippy's demise in 2003. (If you don't want to see the archive or the Flash animations, you can watch them on YouTube.) In 2007, Clippy was removed from Microsoft Office altogether.

The passage of time is an interesting thing, and sometimes things that were objectively the worst can seem less so in hindsight. For example, I have fond memories of waking up at 5:00 a.m. in my teenage years, dressed in a gooey rain suit, and picking tobacco in a muddy field. Microsoft recently released a time-traveling backdrop for Microsoft Teams that includes an endearing portrait of this mascot.

The good news for Clippy haters is that Clippy will not start screaming from the Windows 11 desktop. Instead, they'll be getting access to a wide range of productivity services, from basic productivity applications like Word, Excel, and Outlook to more business and enterprise-oriented programs and features like Teams, Exchange, and SharePoint, through the cloud-based It will be added as an emoji to Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), a subscription service. And while we can't say for sure, of course, we strongly suspect that if Clippy does indeed make a full-fledged comeback, Microsoft will make sure it doesn't become the irritating little annoyance it was 20 years ago.

What is certain is that, assuming Microsoft is serious, Clippy's comeback will happen: this tweet took 20,000 "likes" It took only an hour for the tweet to surpass 20,000 likes. It seems people really miss Clippy. Like I said, time is a funny thing.

I've reached out to Microsoft to see if this is a serious plan or if Twitter's antics just got out of hand. Will update if I hear back.