That’s an odd stance bc at the time it was introduced clippy was almost universally reviled and seen as an example of microsoft taking something that was fine (office 95) and making it objectively worse (office 97 introduced product activation, the stupid paper clip assistant, an arguably dumb UI refresh, and the most hostile part: a new version of the proprietary doc format that wouldn’t render correctly in word 95, forcing people to upgrade)
enshittification wasn’t a concept back then but microsoft certainly lived up to it time and time again
If anything this comic doesn’t make sense because no shit, microsoft started selling your data the nanosecond it became viable to do so. They were always evil. Whereas google at one point literally had a motto of “don’t be evil” in their guidelines or whatever, which fooled a lot of people in the 90s. they famously had to remove because once data collection was becoming obvious it was kind of silly to keep that bit around I suppose
Someone with a stronger background in design and/or art history than me can probably explain it better but I feel like it basically goes back to “apple made a shitload of money with minimalist design under Johnny Ive so that’s what we will replicate for the next few decades because culture in decline and original ideas aren’t good for business”
All I know is every time I complain about how soulless logos and design has become over the past 20-40 years there’s always a sizable contingent of people who reply and vehemently defend this banal soulless flat shit under the guise of accessibility. I don’t get how the right is “far more” accessible and I don’t get how just having clean text in a highly readable font and braille next to the logo wherever possible wouldn’t be far better than any stylized logo for that