The Ribbon was a travesty. Organized menus were replaced by a giant bar full of incomprehensible icons. If you were decent at Office, then your muscle memory was screwed up. (If you were excellent, then maybe you had all the shortcuts memorized and it didn't matter, but most of us are in an in-between state.) If instead you were completely new to Office, then your consistent, discoverable indication of keyboard shortcuts (in the menus) also went away -- no more skill ladder. The only winners were preliterate toddlers, I have to assume.

This was justified with, "I am an HCI expert, trust me". Which is garbage: I'm the user of the tool; don't try to pretend you know better, like some colonial governor.

Also, it started getting slower. A process that only got worse and worse.

My assumption is that it was really all driven by internal politics within Microsoft, specifically some manager's need to Change Something.

[Article author here]

Strongly agreed. Better for newbies, maybe, but disastrous for skilled users. It broke the suite for me: I can't stand it at all, and switched to LibreOffice full time.

Sadly, though, LO Writer doesn't have Outline Mode, the one indispensible bit of MS Office for me. So I keep Word 97 or Word 2000 around, just for outlining.

And Microsoft could have just kept the old menu system. With a single click to switch between the ribbon interface and the menu interface. It could have been as simple as that, saving countless users from so much frustration. Instead they decided to force the inferior interface on every single user, whether they like it or not.

The whole ribbon interface debacle looks like a classic case of enshittification, where the users are no longer the customers anymore.

What for me is really strange, in a way, is that the Mac versions of Office did keep the menu bar, and still do. Until I upgraded to Monterey late last year, I was still using Word 2011. It has the ability to completely hide the entire Ribbon. That suited me well.

But Office 2011 is 32-bit and no longer runs. Now, I only keep Word around. I've been forced to update to 2016, the oldest 64-bit version that'll run on macOS 11 (AIUI).

The menu bar is an inextricable part of the macOS UI so it would be hard to remove, but it demonstrates perfectly that Office for Windows could have kept both UIs, because the macOS version did.

My normal mode of operation in Word for Windows uo to 2003 is just to turn off all the toolbars, and the horizontal scrollbar, and the ruler. It runs well with nothing but a menu bar and every feature is usable.