Ribbons (2007)
When the ribbons first came out, all the techies I knew groused about them with all the technical reasons that people have mentioned here (which I feel are mostly weak arguments and reek of resistance to change). I wasn’t sure myself.<p>Until I saw some non-IT people using them for the first time. They LOVED them. They could easily see and get things done way better than before. The people who didn’t have the confidence to poke around in traditional menus had no problem looking through the ribbons and trying things out. In many cases they started doing things that they had no idea existed. The ribbons really opened up these tools for the users, which is really the whole point.<p>In the case of the ribbons, the techies who rail against them are unequivocally wrong. The arguments against them are the same ones we heard when going from DOS to Windows. It completely loses sight of the point of IT, which is to allow the users to be productive (and no, just because it broke some muscle memory you had, that is not an argument that it broke productivity, that’s an argument that you don’t like change), not to force people to remember random incantations because the greybeard says is “the right way” to do it.