[willywanker]

People are overreacting to Clippy's intrusiveness - firstly you could replace Clippy with other characters like the red ball Dot, or a dog and cat (the latter would curl up and snooze on the screen). And being introduced in Office '97, later versions allowed you to turn off the Agent feature altogether.

So it's a case of looking back with shit tinted glasses. The current environment is far more user hostile. Arrogant devs deciding they know best what the user should be allowed to do (starting with Firefox post version 4 and Windows post version 8). Design solely for mobile and then stretch it to the desktop. Or create a gigantic bloated mess of an Electron app which is just the webpage bundled with a Chrome instance and call it a day. Any day far worse in terms of resource consumption to end up offering less capabilities and worse UX than similar software running on a much slower computer from 25 years ago.