Allegedly Microsoft found out that the problem was that the features covered by that fraction were wildly different in case of MS Office. That is, any cut down, simplification, etc. would result in huge amount of disappointed users, because the used featuresets didn't really overlap outside of certain core. At the same time trying to package it into market segments might just mean you end up with too small niches.

I maintain that the Ribbon on office is this problem writ large: I'm sure Microsoft did a lot of user studies, and I'm equally sure that by averaging out all those results they managed to prioritise nothing useful to any actual business - hence why the product feels bizarrely unprofessional these days and is now impossible to configure to suit any specific type of writing.

AFAIK the research behind the ribbon showed that 1) there was no way to find features easily 2) Main menu was too cluttered and undiscoverable.

Of course if you actually found the features you wanted before that, it was a big negative change.

It could be nicer like intellij, but I suspect they hit some threshold of changing keyboard shortcuts and end user reaction.

If the search interface was what was missing, why the fuck didn't they just add that to the old menus and toolbars? (Seems to work on many Macintosh applications, doesn't it? And probably some Windows ones too.)

Of course a lot of applications later "embraced" Ribbon without all that preparation, and to be quite honest, I don't hear much complaints about Ribbon in Office - outside of nostalgia it's rare.

Many modern video games start by displaying such settings. The defaults probably suit most users just fine, but being able to easily scale UI text is probably very useful for people with poor vision.