[glhaynes]

...so while all this is going on, the Office org came up with its own in-house GPU-accelerated UI introduced in Office 2013 which we can all agree is slow, bloated, glitchy (y'ever used Excel with a 500Hz mouse?), but also proprietary and undocumented, so the wider Windows ecosystem can't benefit from the Office org's framework which would have otherwise (almost) neatly filled the gaps left-behind by the Windows org.

That's funny, just a few hours ago I was looking at some pics of Office 95 running on Windows 95 and reminiscing about how Office's menu bars and toolbars looked/worked differently than the system standard ones despite both being presumably worked on in parallel. Some things never changed.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Well, yeah - Ever since Office 95, the Office UI has always been different to the base OS in some way or another (I think Office 97 was the closest it has ever been to the "stock" Windows UI), but not outrageously-so until Office 2007 came out; Office 2010 is my personal favourite edition because it was the last edition that had a coherent visual design with a fast and snappy UI that didn't require gigabytes of RAM and a GPU to run with reasonable performance, even if Office 2010 cemented the fact that the high-degree of end-user software customization we used to enjoy was now on-the-way-out: now all we can do in Office is choose either Light vs. Dark scheme - and pick from a limited selction of tacky-looking ribbon background images as though we're picking-out a new Trapper-Keeper for the new school-year.

[Narishma]

I don't think Office 95 had a different UI than the rest of the system. The only thing I remember being different about it is the title bar where they introduced the gradient that was later picked by Windows 98 and 2000. The menus and toolbars looked and worked the same as other Windows 95 applications.

You may be thinking of Office 97, which introduced the "flat" look for the toolbars and the animated sliding menus.

[glhaynes]

I believe you’re right, thank you!