Microsoft Plans to Bring Back Clippy

Microsoft on Wednesday posted a tweet that took Twitter by storm. If this tweet gets 20k likes, we’ll replace the paperclip emoji in Microsoft 365 with Clippy. The tweet included an image. The tweet had 30,000 likes after the first two hours. Clippy also was recently seen in throwback Teams backgrounds, along with solitaire and animated Microsoft Paint.

The company didn’t immediately respond to a question on when Clippy might make its emoji debut in Microsoft 365. Last month, Microsoft unveiled some new features coming to Teams. The updates, which will roll out in the upcoming months, are aimed at helping hybrid workforces as companies began to reopen their offices following mass closures during the pandemic.Born in Office 97, Clippy originally appeared as an assistant to offer help and tips for using Microsoft Office. You either loved or hated its Groucho eyebrows and persistence, and Microsoft eventually killed off  in Office XP in 2001.

The famous paperclip nearly made a return a couple of years ago, though. Some Microsoft employees briefly resurrected Clippy as animated stickers in Microsoft Teams, but the company’s brand police swooped in to shut the effort down. It was a brutal firing of the anthropomorphic paperclip, but it looks like Microsoft has now realized humans like to have fun while they’re entering data into spreadsheets or creating a PowerPoint presentation.

Microsoft is putting Windows in the cloud. Windows 365 is a new service that will let businesses access Cloud PCs from anywhere, streaming a version of Windows 10 or Windows 11 in a web browser. While virtualization and remote access to PCs have existed for more than a decade, Microsoft is betting on Windows 365 to offer Cloud PCs to businesses just as they shift toward a mix of office and remote work.