Right, two days and one eaten draft later, an utterly loser-length post:
Well, I don’t. That’s what it is all right. 
And I think that alone is an improvement, certainly on the mishmash of textless, shifting toolbars users were previously presented with, and very definitely on the appearance and disappearance of contextual toolbars, which tended to rearrange things confusingly. Apart from that, the way it rearranges itself to present as much information as possible for a given window width is rather nice, and moderately innovative. But mostly the tabbed aspect is why (IMO) it’s an improvement. It provides locality of reference for groups of commands frequently accessed at similar times, and increases the information on screen for users to work out what each individual button does. I think both of these are almost indisputable improvements.
I don’t think it is per se; I think it’s more that it would’ve complicated the changes they were making, and was thus ditched as less important than actually having a usable interface to start with. It is, however, on the way back in 2010 (in fact it looks like they’ve essentially purchased and extended RibbonCustomizer).
That said, I do happen to think that customisability is a bit overrated, and that often people think they know best, but in fact harm their usability by setting things up “just the way they like it.” I also suspect that the value of customisation is artificially enhanced by just how utterly shit the old interface was. It almost necessitated digging out every button you wanted, and putting it where you knew it was, because finding the motherfuckers in the first place was such an absolute arse. But this shouldn’t be the limit of our expectations of UIs, that we can bully them into being tolerable.
This view seems rather at odds with the rest of the argument here, which is that users are already so locked in to Word 2003’s interface that even something exposing exactly the same functions in a slightly different way is untenable. Microsoft are in fact providing an ideal break point at which other word processor manufacturers can step in and say, “hey! Our UI is just like Microsoft’s old one!” It’s practically the opposite of lock-in. If users can learn the ribbon, they can certainly learn competitors’ UIs.
Look at the default opening screens of:
Wordperfect Office X4
Word 2003
Word 2007
To my eye, those contain mostly the same commands, and mostly the same icons. In no program are they in identical spots; the only really significant difference to my eye is that Word 2007 it’s made explicit what tasks the groups relate to (paragraph, font etc.). I confess I find it very hard to believe that anyone can be so locked in to the specific positions of any of these sets of icons that they would be unable to work with the other interfaces; the key is that classic icons are largely unchanged, and non-standard ones are discoverable. You only have to click something a couple of times to have learnt the new position; the real time goes in finding a function whose icon you don’t know.
I also don’t think the consistency you describe was ever truly there even within Word itself. Because of the way toolbars could be dragged all over the place, and wrapped and displaced each other in an arbitrary manner, at best you could expect the first couple of toolbars or so to be where you put them. Other commands you had to know the icon for, and go hunting for it. Maybe you even had to right-click and remember which toolbar it was in, re-enable it, re-arrange the resulting changes to your toolbar layout, and then click. You could never sit at a co-worker’s computer and expect to find the same toolbar layout. And this, I think, was something Microsoft were seeking to address. Customisability is all very well, but because the old interface was so terrible that customisation became the norm, meaning that in effect everyone had to become their own Office interface designer. It shouldn’t be like that, and it can’t possibly have ended up maximising efficiency over large organisations.
You might argue that in optimising for the common case, the non-expert user, Microsoft has taken something away from power users (and like I say, they’re putting customisation back). And I would probably agree. But I think it’s a tradeoff that had to be made somewhen. Like I say, I think this is the very opposite of Microsoft lock-in. As with Vista, they’ve made some fairly significant changes that have probably harmed take-up of the product in the short term, but have set up the product line to be much better in future.
Hmm, yes, well I certainly wouldn’t ever argue that Word 2007 “blows me away.” Like I said earlier, I think it’s now a more-or-less competent product, as opposed to the steaming pile of manure it once was. I approach it from the point of view of the occasional user, but one who’s usually required to do something reasonably tricky with it (because I mostly have to deal with it when it’s outfoxed a colleague). From this perspective, the new UI is a big improvement, as measured in “number of nearby grannies given coronaries by my swearing.” I still think it’s pretty ghastly typography-wise (although I see 2010 will have advanced OpenType features), and I still wouldn’t choose to write anything longer than a letter in it (I loves me my LaTeX). But it surely is easier to find out how to do new things, and isn’t so different that it takes very long to find how to do old things.
I’m certainly not saying Office 2007 is perfect. I’m also not saying there have been no regressions (I don’t really use Outlook, so can’t comment on what I’m sure are annoying omissions). But I do think the Ribbon has come in for some undeserved stick, and has acted as something of a lightning-rod for other inevitable complaints about the products (which are, after all, still made by Microsoft). I can see the reasons it was introduced (and I really do recommend reading the UI blogs linked to earlier), and I think Microsoft should be given some credit for really taking a step back and thinking things through. No, the results aren’t to everyone’s taste, but it’s a marked improvement on their previous approach to design, and I don’t think the negative motives imputed are fair.
