I never loved the ribbon and I suspect that Microsoft underestimated how disruptive the change was for a lot of people. However, I saw a presentation by one of the lead designers around the time that it was introduced and he certainly made a good case for how the older interface had accumulated way too much cruft.

ADDED: Ah, this is probably it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4

(That said, MS Office in general had been loaded with so many functions that 1% of users used but that were absolutely essential to some 1% that it's something of a mess anyway. It's one reason I prefer the relative simplicity of GSuite these days.)

> I saw a presentation by one of the lead designers around the time that it was introduced and he certainly made a good case for how the older interface had accumulated way too much cruft.

I have also seen well-intentioned arguments for why Clippy was a good idea … but he wasn't.

To this day I miss the Word 5.1 on Macintosh System 7. That was more-or-less the Platonic ideal of a word processor; it's been all downhill since.

Clippy was literally the precursor of things like Alexa and Siri today. The technology wasn't there to back it, but the idea of an anthropomorphic assistant has literally come around to the mainstream today.