[steve8918]

Yes, I use it at work (I use Office 2003 at home). I've grown up on 20 years of Microsoft Word (since Word 2.0 on DOS) so I'm very familiar with the menu system, and I know the features that I need. So Ribbon is annoying for me. I'm sure for new users it's not annoying at all, because it's all they know, and they might find the menu system hard to use.

Hence my point that for new users who tried to migrate to OpenOffice or Google Docs, they would find the menu interface unfamiliar and annoying. I think MacOS is annoying because I can only resize a Window from the bottom right-hand corner, but I'm told they changed that in Lion, which my guess is that it's to appease old farts like me that want to migrate to MacOS. So Apple is doing the reverse, which is to make their OS more palatable (but not completely change) for die-hard Windows users.

[mkr-hn]

I've used Office/OO.o/LibreOffice/WordPerfect for most of my life and had no problem with the ribbon. I've used thousands of interfaces across several OS families, so maybe neither of us has a clue. Bias and anecdata are hard to see past.

Are you sure you're not extrapolating your use case into the audience MS is targeting?

And I'm not sure this is a problem. From my perspective, the ribbon is a huge improvement. Should Microsoft focus on cross-OS metaphors? I want them to focus on improving their product.