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