I think that is what makes it a humor goldmine.
Clippy was useless.
But attaching a Clippy to a language model? Still nominally useless, but mindfully so!
It would be self-deprecating (un-deprecated???) humor for Microsoft, which would take the edge off of the often pushy and tone-deaf corporate look they continually and crassly paint themselves into by default.
And actually potentially useful as a branding touchstone: a visual and interface link across otherwise seemingly disparate model interfaces. Clearly delineating and bridging MS AI tools from all the other mixes of tools we are accumulating.
They could lean into the “clip” in Clippy with a side app for saving and organizing clippings and logs of notable interactions with any MS model, akin to a notes app. With features for compressing convos into compact topic cheat sheets (with retained sources & convos), lists and other helpful info gathering and leveraging tasks.
An ongoing accumulated compressed common core of context for both (hu)man and machine, er … Clippy.
Clippy's popups were useless, but his chat interface actually worked fine (within the domian of MS office questions) things like "how do I add page numbers" or "count the paragraphs in my document")
The pre-clippy natural language help in MS word worked fine too. Chatbot interfaces that work fine are nothing new, it's just very few programs are complex and open-ended enough for them to be a reasonable UI -- but a full-featured word processor probably is
But pushy and tone-deaf is what they are. Unless they change their whole corporate structure for this, it’d be equally tone-deaf for someone from their marketing department to pretend that Microsoft is hip and self-aware now. Better to be honest.
I get the strange feeling you wouldn’t be happy with “New Clippy’s” occasional off topic purchase recommendations!