[AnonC]

The ribbon came in MS Office 2007 as a result of user studies that showed that menus weren’t effective in showing the users what was possible or what features were available in an application. That’s why this new UI (“Fluent UI”) was designed for better discoverability. [1]

Once you do something new and different, I suppose it’s natural to copy it over everywhere else (like Windows Explorer).

[1]: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09

[dingaling]

It was very much an attempted solution to a self-made problem. Default toolbar config in Office programs had become so overwhelming that on a 1024x800 standard-issue corporate monitor you could literally see only a paragraph of text in the content area.

The true solution to that was probably deeper than clustering toolbar items by context. The very concept of a toolbar probably needed to be challenged.

[WorldMaker]

> The very concept of a toolbar probably needed to be challenged.

Uh, that's exactly what the Ribbon did? It challenged the ideas of a traditional toolbar by going back to first principals far enough to the point where traditional toolbar stalwarts hate it on sight.

Half the reason we have debates about the Ribbon is precisely because it challenged the very concept of a toolbar.