Comment by bitwize

Clippy was the beginning of today's dark era, not a relic of some past golden age. With Clippy, users were conditioned to accept computers attempting to anticipate, guide, and shape the user's actions rather than responding to user commands.

For close to 3 decades we've been locked in a philosophical war with Microsoft (vendors in general) over what these stupid machines should really be doing for us, that parallels the exchange between Dr. Gibbs and Ed Dillinger in Tron (1982):

Us: User requests are what computers are for.

Microsoft: Doing our [specifically Microsoft's] business is what computers are for!

If I had a YouTube pfp, I'd change it to Tron—not Clippy.