"Clippy is famous for being one of the worst user interfaces ever deployed to the mass public. He stopped users to ask them if they needed help with basic tasks, like writing a letter or making a spreadsheet. As the Microsoft employee Chris Pratley has written, Clippy was “optimized for first use”: amusing the first time you encountered him, and frustrating after that. He was a puppet who only knew one script and kept repeating it, at you, throughout the workday.

He was also the product, I learned this week, of a male-dominated design process."