The real trick with Ribbon is that in MS Office it makes it somewhat easier to find functionality (the search interface helps with that) and it tries to expose keyboard shortcuts easier.

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.

Paradoxically the ribbon makes harder the one thing it was supposed to make easier. Nothing lines up, so a visual scan of the whole thing is very hard to accomplish.

In the old interface it may have been hard to find things. But once you found them, they were always in the same place. With modern interfaces, everything jumps around and hides itself depending on some obscure context and the window size.

An easy fix would have been adding tool search functionality like intellij

A crucial part of Ribbon, as implemented by MS Office, is a search interface.

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

> A crucial part of Ribbon, as implemented by MS Office, is a search interface.

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.)

Because it wasn't the only thing. Ribbon specifically on MS Office was informed by a lot of data gathered from users and attempting to make functionality more visible (also, it kinda promotes keyboard shortcuts - hit alt and look at ribbon)

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.

Yeah, well, as far as I am concerned, they pretty much failed on the other bits. You not hearing many complaints about it any more is probably because most of us have stopped mentioning it (outside of discussions specifically about it), because nobody gave a shit then either, any more than you do now.