I'm not claiming it isn't true, but I can't say that I've seen it used outside of Microsoft-products either. Does anyone have any examples supporting the "much copied" statement?
With menus, at least you could dig through the menus to find what you're looking for. With the ribbon, you're forced to rely on google to figure out how to use your application.
Ever try and figure out how to display the headers of an e-mail in Outlook?
ld;o
1. You just open the email,
2. look for the area on the ribbon that says "Tags", which is under the message tab,
3, don't click on any of those large icons and look for the itsy-bitsy little box with an arrow at the bottom-right of the "Tags" area, click on that.
4. Up pops a window, look for the subbox at the bottom that says "Internet Headers:"
5. The headers are always larger than that box, but you can click on the box and select-all (ctrl-A, very convenient)
6. Copy and paste into another text tool, which can be a faux-new-email which you bring up by hitting ctrl-N.
[I just had to go through the exercise this morning, and it was such a brain-damaged thing that I couldn't resist documenting it.]
That said, in Microsoft Office it was a horrible idea.
The "ribbon" interface may have been a novel idea for Microsoft, but it did have precedents in ealier software (although the implementation was obviously different).
Here, for example, is a screenshot of Adobe PhotoDeluxe. Adobe discontinued this software in 2002: http://goo.gl/q1LFn
And here's a Lotus Word Pro screenshot with it's tabbed, floating "properties" palette: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Word_Pro.png
In many ways, the Microsoft Office "ribbon" takes a similar approach, but anchors the ribbon to the top of the screen rather than in a floating palette.
The examples above aren't identical to the Microsoft "ribbon" design, but they contain seeds of the same idea.