Steven said:
Can someone please explain how, the "Ribbon" is more productive ? . . .
....
The short, sweet, cynical answer is MSFT wants to sell more units of
Office. The lemmings, er, existing customers who already have licenses
to older versions are likely to upgrade eventually no matter how MSFT
mungs the UI. The growth market is people who've never used Office
before (mostly school aged children and youth). The new UI is meant
for these potential new users who have nothing to unlearn, and once
they learn it it'd be a lot harder for them to try out ribbon-free
alternatives.
The ribbon is all about customer lock-in. If you already have an
Office license, MSFT considers you already locked in (even if you skip
individual upgrades). If you don't already have an Office license,
MSFT wants to make it as difficult as possible for you to consider
alternatives once you do get a license.
More fundamentally for Excel users, the ribbon was designed for Word.
Arguably it may be better for Word users. But where Word goes, all
other Office products must follow, whether that makes sense for the
other products or not. And that means having as few different ribbon
tabs in different Office products as possible. And that means living
with some meaningless tab names.
