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Comment by dpcan | Hacker News Reader

I've believed this for years too! Yes, Win 3.1 was just so simple, made sense, everything worked the same. There were windows with blue bars you could drag. The - icon brought down window controls, you clicked icons, everything was under the File menu.

But JUST when everyone was figuring out the UI, everything changed.

And to this day, when I'm teaching "mom/dad/grandma" to do something in Windows, she STILL asks where the "File" menu is because that's "where everything usually is".

Imagine how much LOVE MS Office would get if it went back to something like the early days of File menus and small-icon tool bars that you could enable/disable, etc? Well, I think it would be a win.

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>> Imagine how much LOVE MS Office would get if it went back to something like the early days of File menus and small-icon tool bars that you could enable/disable, etc? Well, I think it would be a win.

All you're saying is people hate change. Conversely, imagine if Office has always had the ribbon and then they switched to the toolbar menu UI.

Do you honestly think people would like it better? The obvious answer is that, no, of course they wouldn't because the ribbon UI is actually a better UI as it improves discoverability of features (and Office has hundreds if not thousands of features).

I for one make better documents with the ribbon. I think even my dad at this point has learned to be as efficient with the ribbon as he was in the old world. Realistically speaking though it didn't actually take him 7 years.

The world isn't going to improve if we optimize for older generations of people who are used to a certain way of doing things and dislike change. And that statement goes beyond software.

>All you're saying is people hate change. //

I think it's "unnecessary change" that people hate, well on some level. Current MS Office probably is no more of an effective solution than a very old version of Word/Wordpress/Lotus for a large proportion of the population - can you write a letter or CV with it? Yes, well there you go.

So why not give people what they want, familiarity, simplicity. For Microsoft I think the answer would be that then they wouldn't have sold so many copies of new versions of MS Office. It's largely sales/fashion driven rather than meeting further technical needs of users.

People actually love change - the fashion industry is built on that assumption. Shiny-shiny has probably sold far more tech and software than technical needs ever have.

FWIW for me the ribbon based UI paradigm is no better or worse than erstwhile standard of menubar+toolbars [but I've not spent long using MS's ribbons].

Too true. The past 15 or so years has felt like new Office releases were dictated to by the need to sell more copies of Office to existing customers rather than any major improvements to the application. I remember one release where the biggest change was a shift from a MDI to a single window per document.

Office has probably reached a point where there's little you can do to actually make it more functional nor powerful, but it sometimes feels like a con when the revisions are essentially skin deep.

(I will accept that 2007 did cone with some major changes though, such as OOXML)

Actually Office, in my opinion, just had something added that makes it infinitely better: Skydrive integration.

Having files autosave and autoupload after each save means that I never have to worry about losing stuff ever again, I also happen to be completely bought-into the MS ecosystem, with a WP, W8.1 laptop and W8.1 tablet.

You need to remember that your usage doesn't mean others are identical. Personally I honestly find the ribbon bar is more confusing. The mixture of icon sizes, placements and behaviors (Eg drop down menus, toggles or buttons) leaves me guessing a lot of the time. Where as the old menu system might have been ugly and verbose, but I could follow it's logic easier when trying to perform uncommon tasks.

I also dislike the way how the menu bar is hidden in explorer. The only reason behind that is aesthetics so I really resent having to press alt just to display it (I know you can enable it permanently but I get given a lot if laptops to repair due to being the family's "pc fixer").

Thankfully these days theres other decent alternatives to Windows and the importance of the desktop OS is also lessoned with the rise of cross platform browsers and web apps, so it's easy for me to run another OS instead of trapping myself on a platform I dislike and growing bitter about it. But I just wanted to make the point that some people found menu bats easier to use because, for them, menu bars just were simpler to use; rather than them hating something just because it's newer

Have had the ribbon since it came out and I use Office all the time. I don't hate change, I welcome it.

The ribbon is garbage and still wildly less productive than the toolbar. Not even close.

> The world isn't going to improve if we optimize for older generations of people who are used to a certain way of doing things and dislike change. And that statement goes beyond software.

On the other hand, it isn't going to get worse either...!

I'm also in the group who thinks that many of the changes occurring with software today are really only done for the sake of change, to create work, and not actually beneficial. I think the newest trend of hiding UI elements "because it looks better" or "for more screen real-estate" (when screen resolutions continue to get larger) almost borders on being offensively patronising.

95/NT4 were fairly consistent and predictable too. It was after XP that we got competing programs for doing things the system could do, if not better, at least consistently. It beats me why every wi-fi, printer and display driver has to use custom, non-standard, windows, color-schemes, buttons and icons... It's like someone built a whole new GUI inside the driver without any regard to the OS outside. It's no surprise they are 100MB+ downloads.

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