I remember when I was first thinking about designing good pages, I picked up a book called something like "Ugly Websites" and it was drilled into my head that "mystery meat navigation" is always a bad idea.
And that late 90's advice still holds true. Though I am seeing a lot of it lately.
When I saw your comment my first thought was "Bluetooth" but in the context of the article, I can't figure it out either.
The Microsoft Word example is terrible too. The ribbon didn't fix anything, there's still too much to fit on screen at once. The old menus and toolbars were at least scannable, since everything lined up; the ribbon requires much more hunting to find what you need.
The Ribbon is context aware, unlike the old toolbars. So if you're in a graph, you'll see the graph design Ribbon, if you're not then you won't. This gives users less they need to scan and or ignore.
Is the Ribbon a panacea? Absolutely not. But I'd respectful disagree with anyone who claims it is "just as bad" as the old toolbars. They made a lot of accessibility improvements and reduce the training curve substantially.
I'll go along with saying it's not "just as bad"; it's far, far worse, especially when training. Disappearing things are incredibly disorienting to non-expert users.
It is worth stating that in neither case does it function without a relevant item selected.
Meaning with the graph design toolbar, it would be visible, but do absolutely nothing until a graph is selected. With the Ribben it appears when the graph is selected.
I don't see how a disabled toolbar, with no clue how to enable it, helps with user training or clarity.
The disabled toolbar is easier because it still gives context and confidence you are looking in the right place.
'This is what I want...hmm...how do I make it work?' is a far easier process than 'I can't find what I want...where on earth is it?..does it even exist?'
Maybe it's much better for someone using Office daily. Having seen quite a few who are occasional users struggle with the Ribbon it sure seems like they find it worse. With an old static toolbar they could at least hunt and (eventually) click. With the intermittent context awareness they were searching something that was often simply not there at the moment.
I had a relative who ran a mailmerge to print some address labels once a month, which apart from the odd letter was all he did with Word. Without fail after Word 2007 (IIRC the one the Ribbon arrived in) I'd get a monthly call, that usually became long and painful, trying to let him print his labels. Few months later, I visited and put back his old copy of 2003. :)
Somewhat related: I often say that CLIs are GUIs. Letters are pictures to which we've assigned meaning, just like icons. They are just simpler and less ambiguous, and we're all taught a standardized usage from a very early age to the point that it becomes embedded in our brains for highly efficient processing.
And that late 90's advice still holds true. Though I am seeing a lot of it lately.