You have to remember that when Clippy was introduced with Office 97 in Nov. 1996 a lot of people were coming to a PC from a DOS era or older machine, typewriter, or nothing at all. Anthropomorphic assistants were all the rage to teach people how to use a GUI for the first time. Admittedly Microsoft took things too far. But for a lot of people who didn’t know the wizards were there the assistants were genuinely helpful.
You have to remember that when Clippy was introduced with Office 97 in Nov. 1996 a lot of people were coming to a PC from a DOS era or older machine, typewriter, or nothing at all. Anthropomorphic assistants were all the rage to teach people how to use a GUI for the first time. Admittedly Microsoft took things too far. But for a lot of people who didn’t know the wizards were there the assistants were genuinely helpful.