The Office Assistant was supposed to help people get work done more easily by popping onto the screen and offering tips from the application's Help system related to the task being performed. It was intrusive, intensely annoying and widely reviled.

Even people within Microsoft hated Clippy. Steven Sinofsky, now president of the Windows and Windows Live Division, : "the Office Assistant was famously named TFC during development. The 'C' stood for clown. I will let your active imagination figure out what the TF stood for."

In fact, Microsoft used the widespread hatred of Clippy to its advantage by launching an anti-Clippy Web site as a way to promote Office 97's successor, Office XP, because Office XP had the Office Assistant turned off by default. The site received some 22 million page views, according to , and allowed users to do things such as shoot rubber bands at the hated animated character.

In March 2006, Microsoft released Office 2007, which featured a . Gone were the familiar menus and toolbars, replaced by , which put the most commonly used commands on a series of tabbed panels.