I can't imagine you've never used a Microsoft product. Assuming you have, you may have heard of [Clippy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant). Clippy was a feature of Microsoft Office products from 1997 to 2002 and left an indelible mark on the tech industry as one of the biggest software-based personal assistant flops.

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Clippy would pop up on the first run of Microsoft Word and Excel, with a friendly intent of helping you use the products. Its most consistent features included being wrong and unhelpful. If the software industry had used user behavior metrics back then, the Clippy disable button would likely have been the most-used feature in Microsoft products.

Clippy had no clothes, and neither do Clippy Reincarnates Claude, Microsoft Copilots, Gemini, and the like.

## The Incredible Exploding Market

The tech industry is in another bubble. It's boom then bust all over again. Why do I know, you may ask? I lived through the dotcom bubble that occurred from 1995 to 2000, serendipitously around the same time as _The Rise & Fall of Clippy_.

I lived in Redwood City from 1999 to 2001, which is near the heart of Silicon Valley. I'd commute to work while the radio was playing ads for [pets.com](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com) and other now long-defunct Dotcom boom wonders. There were so many wild investments with exceedingly short runways. While the Internet produces tens of billions of dollars per day, back then, we had no idea what it would become. We just ran with it, and people took the general-purpose technology anywhere it could go, costing billions in the process. In that ~5yr period, about 100 billion was invested in the likes of [iSmell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell) by DigiScents Inc., which delivered USB-powered diffusion right to your home. Imagine opening an email from pets.com with a wet-dog smell on the envelope.

_I smell the dog right now._

## Investment Shark Frenzy

Those Silicon Valley investors LOVE disruptive technologies like GenAI. It offers a chance to fuck over their rivals by stealing their market share while using tech geeks with fancy toys in drawn-out proxy wars.

How much money is being thrown around in this bubble?

We're trending toward about the same level of investment from 1995 to 2000 and from 2022 to today, when you account for inflation. So yes, we're in a bubble, and it's going to pop when investors stop shoving money in the Silicon Valley slot machine.

To add to my thesis: crazy boy toys like Elon Musk want to build data centers in space; I'm sure the pigs will be happy to have low-latency chatbot replies.

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It's looking grim for the average person when those VCs pull the rug out from under their insane investments, lick their capitalist wounds, and slap on their gold-infused band-aids.

## The Naked Clip

The Internet has real value, and it certainly made hundreds of investors giddy. Look at the usual suspects leading the tech charge like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and the like. They're the same ones selling you clippy on steroids.

GenAI has value, but its value is disproportionate to the amount of money being poured into it, like Viserys's golden crown—it's a tool that speeds up everything, but to what end? We'll have more data of questionable value littering the already enshitified Internet, more mistakes than ever, and a whole lot of finger-pointing about who caused the crash.

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Just as Clippy Classic's lies and damn lies killed it and the Emperor's pride, Clippy 2.0 and its agent armies will fall. Eventually, humanity will tire of the Game of Corporate Thrones and turn away from the shiny baubles peddled by VCs and their minions.

## In The Meantime

So what? We're in a bubble. What can we do to jump away from the impending explosion's perimeter?

Level up your [power skills](https://jeffbailey.us/resume/#power-skills), triple down on integrity, question everything, leverage your experience and personal taste developed through millions of microfailures.

Learn to iterate quickly and rip the bullshit out of GenAI's outputs, creating valuable results.

Become the conductor outside the purview of the GenAI bubble. None of these machines can live in the real world with all the context it needed to navigate the beautiful mess we call life.

Drive hard with laser-focused discernment. GenAI has no clue how to distinguish what actions or information are important within your individual context.

And most importantly, never stop learning and take a deep breath—this too shall pass.