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A comment on Ask HN: Why doesn't Microsoft bring Clippy back instead of Copilot?.

Re:Ask HN: Why doesn't Microsoft bring Clippy back instead o... by wkat4242 on Sunday January 26, 2025 @11:02PM (#42837288)
Clippy was extremely useless. It was really good at being annoying and nothing else. It still carries that reputation to people that used it.

There were many early memes around it. "I see you're slamming the keyboard in frustration, will I turn on caps lock for you?"

There's no way they'll want to associate copilot with that. It would be a huge marketing fail.

On the other hand, Microsoft marketing is the worst in the industry by far so yeah it's kinda surprising they haven't gone there :)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Why doesn't Microsoft bring Clippy back instead o... by wmil on Monday January 27, 2025 @04:18AM (#42838988)
Originally it used a bayesian learning algorithm, so if you kept dismissing it in frustration it would stop appearing.

However the product people decided that it would be the major feature to market the new office version. Thus they demanded that Clippy appear more often so that they could show off the feature easily.

[ Parent | on HN ]