Microsoft vs. The Menu
From Coding Horror, On The Death Of The Main Menu:
UI innovations in Office tend to be rapidly adopted by Microsoft across their entire product line. Not only there, but in third party applications and even other operating systems. Remember the toolbar? That was unknown until it debuted in Word in the early 90’s**. Now it’s ubiquitous. The “ribbon” is a similar paradigm shift. Eventually we’ll all be using these tabbed palettes with nary a drop-down menu in sight. I expect the traditional WIMP main menu to go the way of the dodo soon after the release of Vista and Office 12 in 2006.
But is this a good thing? As others have noted, the impetus behind this UI development is feature creep. Also, it does have a vestigial menu, to which all file-oriented commands have been relagated (which I think supports my contention that Microsoft simply forgot where Apple’s menus were). At this point, that strikes me more as an “Etc.” category than a well-thought-out design choice. Users will still have to think about whether or not a particular command is “file-oriented” or not.
I’d prefer an all-or-nothing approach: add a “File” tab, and make a permanent 32×32 Save button on the left of the ribbon strip.
One of the things that has always prevented developers from implementing Office features in non-Office products has been Microsoft’s reluctance to share. If developers wanted Office XP-esque menus, they had to implement that functionality themselves. The most Microsoft provided you with was the CoolBar, upon which Internet Explorer 5 was based. Hopefully Microsoft realizes that UI widgets have a network utility, and will release a .NET library for the Ribbon, but I’m not holding my breath.