Comment 480 for bug 532633

Jeff makes a good point about his wife exclaiming "Can't they leave anything alone??". We had similar immense pain when we upgraded to Office 2007 at my work. The office "ribbon" wasn't just viewed as a waste of developer time by our staff, but also caused actual affront. As if Microsoft had scrapped toolbars and introduced the ribbon very specifically to annoy our staff.

A short article corroborating this experience :
http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/office_2007_training/

(Yes, we upgraded anyway, but by god, yes, we needed a /lot/ of training and nearly two years later, few have anything good to say about the ribbon)

As for the latest updates making the buttons theme-dependent, this is kind of good news, but I also worry that even simply offering a theme with buttons on the left will introduce very real support issues. For example, when supporting PC-illiterate staff remotely and without access to VNC/screen control - you may have to ask these people to "move your mouse up to the top right of the window and click on the little "x" button". Well, that's not going to work if they've chosen a radiance theme, is it? A minor point perhaps, but we've been asked for data, so here it is.

The way this change was introduced, the blind-siding and subsequent utter silence on the matter and the recent comment spam from Pako and to a less extent, Scholli, have made it extremely difficult for me to see the matter objectively. And I can't believe that there /still/ hasn't been any real counter arguments to comment #71. That comment, incidentally, was a touch over two weeks ago. I know. It feels longer.