I wouldn't mind the Microsoft Agent characters getting a shout-out or acknowledgement these days. But to be fair, I get hopelessly nostalgic for such things since I was on a Windows XP for years, bored at school with a computer with no games, locked down internet, and nothing but paint and wordpad to entertain myself with. After a while I discovered if you saved a notepad file with a .VBS extension you could write VBS files to have agents like Merlin and Spot act out small stories.

Moving past my nostalgia trip, sometimes I wonder if a plurality or majority of Windows users have moved from loving or hating Clippy to loving to hate or loving to defend Clippy. Perhaps as a form of proto-fanbases akin to Trekkies vs. Trekkers or worse Star Trek vs. Star Wars etc.

Today, I keep Office 97 and 2000 installs going since they are extremely screaming fast for the documents or very basic spreadsheets I use compared to current versions of Excel or even LibreOffice. I leave Clippy on, but rarely talk to him. I don't mind him much and when I'm pausing to think, seeing him animates provides a moment of idle novelty that seems to help my mood somehow, like a mental pallet-cleansing grape.

Clippy is my PC Tamogatchi I guess.

Back Clippy up with some cloud AI, and let him learn.

Replace Cortana with Clippy better.