Posting this because I often see a lot of comments disparaging the Ribbon UI, but I think it has its merits, and its worthwhile to see how it came into existence. It was developed because the traditional dropdown menus they were using in 2003 weren't able to keep up with the sheer volume of features they were adding. I wonder how long it can continue into the future. Will Word eventually be so packed with stuff that even the Ribbon UI isn't enough? Maybe you'll just get a command palette where you search for what you want, as in VSCode. Or an embedded LLM ...
Also the initial title I submitted this under was "The Story of the MS Ribbon", I like that HN seems to automatically strip out filler phrases.