> I think the key thing here is that MS Word had the features most people need back in Win3 days (possibly earlier?).
That's a very narrow view of what people need. Children at home these days "type" essays into Word by dictating as a first-party feature. This is a pretty recent step forward -- in the past it used to be a very expensive third-party add-on with much less accuracy.
Good, scalable multi-user document editing has changed the way students and even workers take notes in classrooms and workshops. Again, a fairly recent phenomenon (although Word still isn't as good as Google Docs here -- c'mon Microsoft, keep up).
I think the key thing here is that MS Word had the features most people need back in Win3 days (possibly earlier?).
There's stuff you want to do that punch cards don't allow, eg duplicate a program virtually; but there's not stuff people wanted to do that menu based wordprocessor UI prevented.
Ribbons fine, but no advance for me over menus, on balance I prefer menus but that might just be familiarity and age.