I really wish MS had worked on bringin their 2008, pages-inspired mac UI to windows rather than bringing the ribbon to the Mac.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/07/11/14/road_to_mac_offic...

Since then Apple switched from having a seperate inspector window for the controls to having a sidebar. I see this as a downgrade, but a minor one.

And MS kind of went for the same idea but laid out the blocks horizontally. Which… since text is wider than it is tall, makes labels hard to fit in.

And because people don’t scroll horizontally, they made the available options change based on the window width. So if you want to see everything, you’ll make the window fairly wide, at which point you’ve got the ribbon using up vertical real estate, and blank space on the sides where a side-bar or inspector could’ve been.